The covid-19 crisis, mental health of healthcare workers and trade union actions insights from interviews

The hospital sector in Europe was structurally in a bad shape when the pandemic started, especially as regards understaffing and work-related psycho-social risks among healthcare workers. The pandemic led in all countries to severe mental health problems among healthcare workers, such as fear of corona infections, loneliness in isolated workplaces, frustration at the lack of protective equipment, feelings of ‘guilt’ at not being able to prevent deaths, exhaustion after long working hours and stress in combining work with family life in a pandemic that never seemed to stop. And sometimes anger at not being treated fairly or appreciated. After the third wave and after the pandemic, healthcare workers’ severe exhaustion from long-term stress and sometimes trauma came under the spotlight. All stakeholders were operating in new, very uncertain circumstances. The interviews showed that trade unions were not the key players in discussion with the governments. Neither were they much involved in social dialogue and collective bargaining with hospitals, although we see variations across the European countries. We critically discussed several measures initiated by hospitals during the pandemic: protection against transmission of the coronavirus, new crisis-related working hours schedules, telephone helplines, internal mobility programs for nurses, and individual psycho-social support for healthcare workers. Generally speaking, trade unions and other workers' representatives had very limited involvement in management decisions at hospitals. Many unions struggled to adapt to the new realities of difficult communication with their workers in uncertain circumstances and with the ‘Emergency Legislation’ that overruled labour law and traditional social dialogue. Nevertheless, some unions were successful in agreeing extra compensation for workers and/or income benefits for those who fell sick. We described a ‘best case’ from Germany where the union saw the pandemic as an opportunity to address structural problems in hospitals and was able to mobilize many healthcare workers and agree better staff-patient ratios in collective agreements with hospitals. One important finding is that according to the twelve interviewees, very little or nothing has been learned from the Covid-19 crisis. Many measures, such as psychological help for healthcare workers, were scaled down after the crisis. Since the crisis, understaffing in the hospital sector has become an even bigger problem because many workers have left the sector and because many (new) young people find hospital jobs too unattractive and too stressful.