Workforce Issues at Mental Health Hospitals

Blog Post (workforce)

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Workforce issues at Mental Health Hospitals
Nursing is a complex job when to it comes to managing the ethics while performing the job roles.
Mental health hospitals require an excellent quality workforce that is capable of performing their
operations with little mistakes and with high precision. Mental illness is an issue of heterogeneous
characteristics and enormous complexity when in terms of level of disorder or dysfunction,
diagnosis, duration of disease or symptoms as well as social attitudes relative to concepts of
dangerousness and deviancy.1 People that are facing mental health challenges come from different
sections of the society and may have different cultural backgrounds. Due to these differences, it is
essential that the workforce that is present at the hospital either is from different cultural
backgrounds or have received a formal cross-cultural training.
1 Lin Perry et al., ‘The mental health of nurses in acute teaching hospital settings: a cross-sectional survey’
(2015) 14 (1) BMC Nursing 15.

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Figure 1: Scientific American, 2017
Ethical challenges such as distributing resources in such a manner that every patient receives the
care that they require are a major challenge for the organisation. Social attitude towards the mental
health problems are not good hence it might get reflected in the way employees treat with the
patients.2 Generally the mental health patients require continuous monitoring hence presence of
adequate numbers of staffs at the workplace is important. This is essential for enhancing the service
quality as well as for ensuring that intensive care is provided to the workers. It is generally seen that
mental health patients tends to harm people who takes care of them hence the workforce need to
behave with extreme patience and must be able to tackle different situations.
2 Marit Helene Hem, Bert Molewijk and Reidar Pedersen, Ethical challenges in connection with the use of
coercion: a focus group study of health care personnel in mental health care’ (2014) 15 (1) BMC Medical Ethics
82.