Many of us have been unlucky enough to experience a stressful workplace in our time. According to a 2018 study, around a third of workers in the UK felt that their work-life balance was poor; further, nearly three-quarters of all adults in the UK have felt overwhelmed by stress in the past year.

Work-life balance is hard to manage at the best of times, it seems. But in the field of healthcare, it can be even harder to manage. This is especially true within a National Health Service besieged by administrative failures and funding shortages, where staffing is tight and workloads harsh. Achieving a good work-life balance is vital.

Work-Life Balance and Mental Health

Indeed, seeking work-life balance is not just a matter of making your workload more manageable. A failure to unblur those lines between work and free time can also be deleterious to your mental health – with potentially disastrous consequences. Stress and low energy can lead to poor performance, which in healthcare can lead to serious consequences for patients. Just as you would put your oxygen mask before others in a turbulent aeroplane, so too should you put your health before your work.

Your employers will have a team of legal experts ensuring, alongside more specific measures such as patent protection and licensing, that the systems within the system (so to speak) are protecting employees and patients alike. But if they don’t, the infrastructure can fail the worker – in turn failing the programme and potentially the human lives that depend on it. Rather than relying on fallible institutions to ensure your needs, and by extension the needs of those in your care, are met, you could try to incorporate some basic thought processes into your routine.

Organisation and Priorities

The first of these is arguably the easiest: organisation. You should start by listing out your various work responsibilities, and organising them in two distinct ways. One should relate to your professional priorities, and the other to the time each task takes. Understanding these key bits of information is crucial, as you can draw up a rough schedule for your day that collapses these tasks into a reasonable and practicable schedule – within work hours.

Making Time for You

If you check out this dentist in Milford MA, they'll tell you that your "me" time should include doing activities you like, exercising, eating healthy food, and visiting a medical expert regularly.

Of course, all of this is designed to help you with one specific thing: the creation of more time for you. While time and task management skills are invaluable for progressing in healthcare and can make you a much better practitioner to patients, these are essentially ancillary benefits. What is more important is your mental health, as illustrated by the oxygen mask analogy earlier.

This philosophy can be incorporated into your organising. Have you left yourself ample time for breaks? Do you have opportunities to leave the lab, desk, or ward, and get some fresh air? Little breaks throughout the day can make a hard day much more bearable – and your life easier to boot.