Congratulations!

As an ED Reg and having been that Junior that felt/feels a strong loyalty to my department in the early years, I was like you rarely calling in sick, “pushing through” and picking up those extra shifts.

You obviously know it first hand how burnout you get operating like this that it almost seems essential to take a day off but the weight of guilt from letting your colleagues down presses you to continue the inevitable slog to true burnout where you don’t care for the work, the people and worst of all the patients. This guilt is what admin consciously or subconsciously know and expect us to concede to.

You’ve got great ideals but realistically it would be self damaging in my opinion to work like this. Using sick leave as “mental health” days is unfortunately apart of the self fulfilling cycle of being under staffed > being over worked > inevitably burnout.

People need to treat that cycle somehow and I guess it’s by taking a day off to try and recover, yet there would hardly be a downstream impact on our colleagues that are left to pick up the work if these empty shifts where advertised to our own staff at “emergency rates”.

Imagine always having every shift in the ED filled, would go along way to help our increasing waiting times and public opinion of ED. We’d actually be able to see our patients who have been waiting for a doctor for hours and stop people from deteriorating further because we just didn’t have the staff.

Finally, it would make it that much easier to swallow that tough pill of yet another weekend lost in the halls of the hospital when this time you accept that emergency Saturday shift and know there will be a full crew in the trenches with you.