Workforce Issues at Mental Health Hospitals

This article discusses the workforce issues faced by mental health hospitals, including the need for a diverse workforce and the ethical challenges involved. It explores the impact of social attitudes, the importance of adequate staffing, and the complexity of caring for mental health patients. The article also highlights the global decrease in mental health staff and the knowledge gaps that can lead to improper patient handling. Additionally, it addresses the ethical concerns related to conflicts among staff and the need for strong workforce policies and training.

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.

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Figure 2: Independent, 2016
At the global levels there is serious decrease in the numbers of staffs in the mental health settings. It
is a challenge for the companies to find out the best talents. This is the condition when the numbers
of people that are suffering from mental disorders have increased. Alone in U.S., there are 28.1% of
the population that was diagnosed with some kind of mental illness in one year time frame. Due to
this at health care settings, employees have to work for extra hour which is again raising the ethical
concerns for the companies. The complexity also gets increased because there cannot be higher use
of technology in the care of the mental patients because their care needs are different from patients
of other diseases. It requires more emotional touch in the way patients are handled as it helps them
in giving them an environment where they feel safe. Bringing emotional intelligence within the staffs
is a serious challenge for the company as feeling are hard to build and there is no specific training for
it.3 Forcing cannot be an effective method for treating patients as these mental patients can get
aggressive. In such situation they might hurt others and there is a high probability that they get
injured. This is a serious issue for the workforce if any patient gets hurt then it is a team failure. It is
seen that mental patients often hurt staffs while they are taking care of them. In such situation the
staffs also gets frustrated. This is one of the major reasons of higher turnovers at the mental
healthcare settings.
In such health care settings it is essential that employees become part of the multi-disciplinary
teams. These teams must have emotional touch so that they can work with each other in a better
manner. This helps in bringing supportive team environment which is further essential for improving
the quality of services being delivered by the organisation.4 At the same time, different cultures have
different understanding about the mental illness hence employees coming from these cultures must
3 John Ballatt and Penelope Campling, Intelligent kindness: Reforming the culture of healthcare (RCPsych
Publications 2011).

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only follow a common professional approach while performing their operations. These ethical issues
become critical in the case of patients that are older in age. This is because their care needs are
higher than that of patients from other age groups.
Figure 3: U.S.News, 2018
Knowledge gaps in the workforce also raise the ethical concerns. This might be understood by the
fact that mental disorders are different and its effect differs from patients to patients. Due to this,
understanding the problems of each patient can be difficult for employees which result in improper
handling of the patients. Behaviour of the employees also starts getting affected by the behaviour of
the patients and hence managing their personal development is not easy. This also affects the
productivity of the staffs and the quality of their service which might increase the unethical practices
at the workplace. There is always a fear of human right violations while treating the patients and
hence companies need to ensure that all the operations are done as per the ethical manuals.
Like other places, conflict is an issue at the mental health setting. Conflicts among the staffs increase
the tension at the workplace and have a direct impact on the team work and the way things are
managed. This creates an ethical issue for the hospital as they will not be able to give the care that
patient’s deserved. If the conflict is between the people at different levels of organisation, then
there is a chance that proper management of human resource is not done. This is a serious ethical
concern in relation to managing ethics at the workplace.5
All the mental health organisations require strong workforce policies which ensure that staffs work
according to the rules and regulations. The user manuals must be made checking each and every
4 IHI, Institute for Healthcare Improvement: How to Reduce Implicit Bias (2017)
<http://www.ihi.org/communities/blogs/how-to-reduce-implicit-bias>.
5 Neil Gopee and Jo Galloway, Leadership and management in healthcare (3rd ed., Sage 2017).

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ethical aspect. Providing workforce training that enhances the capabilities of the staffs so that they
may not face any problems in performing their job roles is important. Since there are large numbers
of women who are also affected by the mental disorder hence companies need to ensure that they
have enough of women employees to provide better care. Company need to change the thinking
about the mental patients and should take the help of family members to improve the mental health
service6. Each and every practice of the employees needs to be monitored so that it can be
documented and changes can be made accordingly.
6 Chris Lloyd et al., Clinical management in mental health services (John Wiley & Sons 2009).

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Bibliography
Books
Ballatt J and Campling P, Intelligent kindness: Reforming the culture of healthcare (RP 2011)
Gopee N and Galloway J, Leadership and management in healthcare (3rd ed., Sage 2017)
Lloyd, C, King, R, Deane, F, & Gournay, K, Clinical management in mental health services (JWS 2009)
Journals
Hem MH, Molewijk B and Pedersen R, Ethical challenges in connection with the use of coercion: a
focus group study of health care personnel in mental health care’ (2014) 15 (1) BMCME 82
Perry, L, Lamont, S, Brunero, S, Gallagher, R, & Duffield, C, ‘The mental health of nurses in acute
teaching hospital settings: a cross-sectional survey’ (2015) 14 (1) BMCN 15
Websites
IHI, Institute for Healthcare Improvement: How to Reduce Implicit Bias (2017)
<http://www.ihi.org/communities/blogs/how-to-reduce-implicit-bias>.