Tips on Avoiding Burnout for Personal Support Workers

We’ve all been there.  On the edge.  We’ve had enough.  In short, we feel burned out.  This is something that every personal support worker has gone through.  Here are some tips to avoid burnout as much as possible.

1)   Monitor Your Diet and Exercise:  We have to monitor our patient’s diet, yet we often don’t monitor our own diet, and our job requires us to have a certain level of fitness.  So I suggest strongly that you monitor your diet and engage in a regular exercise program.

2)   Get The Proper Amount Of Sleep:  This probably seems like something that should be intuitive but it’s not.  When we are young, we need less sleep, but as we get older we need more.  Yet sleep is the one thing we give up on a regular basis.  Sleep is the one thing that really helps you to rejuvenate.  Ensure that you always get enough sleep.

3)   Be Honest About How Many Days You Can Really Work:  Not everyone can do this type of work full time.  Maybe for you, it makes sense to work part time.  Also, due to factors like the economy, we don’t always take enough time off.  Please take as much time off as you need to.

4)   Don’t Be Afraid To Ask For Help At Work:  Sometimes we find ourselves in difficult situations at work.  If you find yourself in such circumstances, always ask for help.  There is no need to carry the entire load yourself.

Follow these tips and they will help you avoid burnout at work as much as possible.

New Employment Trends for Personal Support Workers

One thing we have noticed in the healthcare industry is the trend of large healthcare service providers using a larger number of personal support workers to do the same overall amount of work.  You may have noticed an increase in job postings for personal care workers with a lot emphasising their urgency in hiring new personal support workers.  In theory this increase in hiring is a good thing, but the flip side is that while new personal support workers are being hired, the hours they are receiving are not adding up to full-time hours.  Additionally, the hours that many established personal support workers are being scheduled for are consistently going down.  This seems to be a deliberate and concerted effort by large healthcare providers to ensure that their personal support worker staff does not qualify for full-time status.  Why would they do that? Will if you are an employer, it is advantageous to you to keep your employee base at a part-time level.  Why? Because part-time employees are essentially only entitled to their salary.  They are not entitled to consistent hours or anything else.  When an employee becomes full-time, they become entitled to a consistent set of minimum hours, in many cases, an increase in salary, and finally, they are entitled to benefits.  Thus, the reason why the trend among larger healthcare providers to hire more personal support workers at part-time hours, rather than fewer personal support workers at full-time hours.