Over the past year, one health and social care worker in the UK has resigned every second.
That’s a record total of more than half a million employees over the last 12 months – 508,362, to be exact.
Strikes in the sector are now a regular occurrence, with junior doctors currently undertaking the longest period of industrial action in NHS history.
And despite the prime minister’s announcement today that junior doctors will receive a 6% pay rise, health workers have also cited stress and burnout as reasons why they have left their jobs, or why they are strongly considering quitting.
A new website called Why Would Anyone Do This Job? has been launched by online development platform Feaniks so workers can share their most extreme experiences in a safe space – and to encourage people to think about what goes on behind the scenes.
TikTok star Dr Michael Mrozinski, who previously worked at an NHS hospital in Glasgow but left after seven years, said: ‘While I’ve been at work I’ve been sworn at, I’ve been swung for, I’ve been spat at, I’ve been p***** on, I’ve been called all the names under the sun.
‘All this seemed to be par for the course, not just for doctors, but for all healthcare workers.’
Now working as a doctor in Melbourne, Australia, after being disillusioned and fed up with pay and quality of life as a junior doctor in the UK, he told a harrowing story of trying to save a man who had been stabbed.
‘We brought him into [resuscitation] and it became apparent he was quickly deteriorating,’ he said.
‘Because he was young, the resuscitation went on for a very long time, but was unsuccessful.
‘I was in a state of shock, I hasn’t ever seen anything like this. The room, and I, was covered in blood. I’ll never forget it as long as I live.’
He said he had to go straight back to work afterwards and he apologised to the next patient for the long wait, who responded: ‘I don’t care, I just want my shoulder sorted out.’
Dr Michael added: ‘I think in that moment, I realised that medicine is a thankless task the majority of the time. We rarely do get any thanks and seem to bear the brunt of people’s frustrations.
‘I didn’t get any psychological support in the hospitals, and I still feel traumatised by this, to this day.
‘Psychological support should be mandatory for junior doctors, who are young people in their twenties when exposed to traumatic situations.’
In April, 52% of doctors reported suffering poor mental health in the previous year, and more than three-quarters of frontline doctors said they had been affected by burnout.
There is now a National Physician Suicide Awareness Day on September 17, because doctors are up to four times more likely to die by suicide compared to the general population.
Several doctors have previously told Metro.co.uk about how their mental health is suffering.
Dr Elle-Louise Morris, a junior doctor based in Yorkshire, spoke about how she started a night shift to see she had been allocated 80 tasks to complete.
‘When there are such a high volume of tasks, it is extremely challenging to filter through to the most important jobs,’ she said. ‘Some of these jobs could be postponed to the following day, but about three-quarters genuinely needed to be done overnight, as well as anything new.
‘This ranged from prescribing, to chasing test results, to assessing unwell patients. As a new doctor, this felt very overwhelming.
‘When I left the shift, I was thinking for days about diagnoses and investigations I may have missed. I did my best clinically and was happy with my decisions – however, I felt drained both emotionally and physically.
‘It is worrying and stressful to enter a medical career at the moment. I can completely appreciate why colleagues are choosing to leave the NHS, for systems with better staffing and pay, and I genuinely feel that things need to improve soon.’
Dr Simon Flemming, an orthopaedic surgeon based in London, campaigns to improve standards in medical training and drive out bullying and racism in the NHS.
‘Now, there is work ongoing to try to address these issues, but at a fundamental, foundational issue, healthcare is still based around power, patriarchy, and problematic behaviours.
‘The reason we struggle to recruit and retain staff is because we have normalised all of these things.
‘Until we address all of them, until respect and belonging and accountability are what we do and who we are, we will never address the recruitment and retention crisis we have in healthcare.’
Rishi Sunak told a press conference today the government was working to ‘make the NHS strong again’ with its latest measures.
The PM said: ‘The government has not only made today’s decision on pay. We’ve backed the NHS with record funding, delivered the first ever, fully funded long-term workforce plan and met the BMA’s number one ask of government, with a pensions tax cut worth £1 billion.
‘So, we should all ask ourselves, whether union leaders – or indeed political leaders – how can it be right to continue disruptive industrial action?
‘Not least because these strikes lead to tens of thousands of appointments being cancelled – every single day and waiting lists going up, not down.’
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