Workplace Stress 11.9.21 - CSP ePortfolio

Intro

Within the first 24 hours of starting my new placement, I knew I wanted to leave.

It was an incredibly stressful first day and I couldn't see how I was going to stick it out for the rest of the week, let alone another 6 on top of that.

I asked my uni if I could transfer, but was met with a resounding "no", as there weren't enough placements to go around.

As escaping the stress was not going to be an option, I would need to learn how to deal with it instead, or else risk not getting through to the other side of this placement in one piece

Stress Test Score

What Happened?

On the first day of my new placement I was completely overwhelmed. I had no induction, no experience with neuro or community work, and absolutely hated going to care homes. The diary ended up being non-stop all day, I was shouted at by one patient, got covered in urine whilst seeing another, and we ended up finishing late, before I had over an hour's commute back home

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Feelings

I was beside myself with stress all day, and struggled to shake it off once I got home. I spent the entire day thinking of how I could get out of this placement, and even drafted a message to my university requesting a transfer as soon as I got home. I was filled with dread at the thought of having to go back the next day, let alone having to keep it up for another 6 weeks

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Action Plan

I started reading resources from Mind.org, which helped me to validate that my stress was a result of my needs not being met, and this is a reasonable expectation to have of your workplace. These also signposted me to further resources about helping build resilience, and develop assertiveness in negotiating fair treatment.

From the resilience resources, I learnt that it is absolutely necessary to take breaks from a stressful situation in order to be able to approach it constructively, which conflicts my previous methods of either running away, or powering through until its over. I learnt that once I have identified the factors causing my stress, I need to speak to the other parties involved in order to find a solution.

I didn’t feel at all confident about talking to the clinic manager, so sought advice on this from the MindTools resources on assertiveness. This taught me that assertiveness lies in the middle of a spectrum with passivity at one end, and aggression at the other.

In order to strike the correct balance, I would need to empathise with the needs of the clinic, recognise how my own needs might conflict with these, and suggest a compromise somewhere in the middle to create a win-win situation. With this new way of looking at the stress I had faced over the first week of the placement, I used Mind.org’s Wellness Action Plan as a template to identify my stressors and offer realistic solutions for how to resolve them, keeping in mind the clinic’s need for me to continue seeing patients at the same volume. For example, I realised that two of my major stressors were having no breaks, and feeling unsafe due to not being supervised whilst seeing very frail or complex patients. In the Plan I offered a solution of protected time for breaks and debriefing sessions, recognising that in-person supervision is not always practical for the clinic.

By going through this process I feel better able to recognise my own workplace stressors, explore how they could be managed, and negotiate realistic strategies to ameliorate them that would not compromise the needs of my employers. I feel that these skills will help me to cope with the rest of this placement, and could also be used to cope with stressful workplace events in future

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Analysis

I reasoned with myself that “if this was a job, I would just leave”, and whilst this is true, it circumvents the issue at hand entirely. Whilst it would be unlikely to need to endure extreme workplace stress in the long-term in the future, it would be very likely to be in similar situations in the short-term, both on subsequent placements and on bad days at work. By addressing my ability to handle workplace stress, rather than avoid it, I could protect my own mental wellbeing, clinical competency, and fitness to practice in future situations

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Evaluation

I struggled to identify what exactly I had found so stressful, my response to my family asking me this was “just all of it”. I suppose the one good point to take away was that this confirmed my preconceptions that I didn’t want to work in community, and at least I’d actually tried it now. The major drawback of the situation was that there was no way out, I did have to stick it out for 6 weeks, so I needed to find a way to cope with the stress ↓

Conclusion

To better understand how to overcome workplace stress on this placement, I would first need to identify what exactly the causative factors were, how they could realistically be mitigated, and how doing so could help to deal with further stressful events in future

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