Danielle Mik:

Hi, everyone. Welcome again, to the Pearls of Wisdom. I’d like to introduce Pieter Walker, who we’re chatting with today about the challenges of developing mentally healthy workplaces in the healthcare sector. So Pieter’s got 29 years of healthcare experience. He’s a management consultant, specializing in process improvement to assist organizations in the healthcare sector transform their culture, develop their people, improve staff wellbeing, reduce cost, and improve workplace efficiencies. Pieter’s worked closely with a large number of healthcare organizations across multiple states of Australia. So he’s got a really strong understanding of how these systems work and the status of mental health of the employees within these organizations. So as we can see, Pieter’s very well credentialed to talk about mental health in the healthcare sector. So welcome Pieter, thank you for joining me today on the Pearls of Wisdom. So looking forward to hearing your pearls of wisdom on the subject.

Danielle Mik:

Look, as we know that healthcare sector’s been pretty hard hit over the last couple of years with COVID, in particular. At the moment, the mental health injury rates put to health and welfare support workers at third in the mental health injuries in Australia. So it’s a pretty significant issue, obviously, in that at space. And we know across the board, mental health is a big issue. One fifth of Aussies are experiencing mental health condition. Three quarters say mental health is an important consideration when applying for a job, for example, these days. And half believe that it’s the employer’s role to do more to support mental health in the workplace. And PWC did research, which showed the return on investment for every dollar is $2.30. So it seems that employers can win in terms of their investment. And I guess that’s part of what you do, Pieter, is show them how that return on investment actually can happen.

Danielle Mik:

So let’s talk about what you do. So over to you. So what would you, in your experience in the healthcare sector, say the most common mental health conditions are with workers in that sector?

Pieter Walker:

So I think, Danielle, that in an already strained system, that’s under a lot of pressure, COVID as you were saying, has actually just put another whole layer of complexity on top of an already very, very stressed system. And we’re seeing a lot of burnout in people, and a lot of stress and anxiety here in the Northern territory where I live on work. The attempted suicide rate and the suicide rate is about five times higher than the national average. And that’s predominantly in men between 25 and 35 years of age, and much higher in indigenous population. So anxiety and stress, we see very commonly up here. It’s hard to recruit staff so other staff are working longer hours, and there are very, very high turnover rates up here. So mental health is a significant problem, not only across the country in health services, but also up here in the territory.

Danielle Mik:

So Pieter, what do you think are the main causes for the stress and the burnout? Is it just the long hours, or is there more to it? Is it the increased risk that they feel? What’s giving rise to that?

Pieter Walker:

So I think some of it has to do with the hierarchy that is built up in healthcare organizations, and even middle managers are scared to actually speak up. I think that’s one of the key reasons. I think another one of the key reasons is that many managers and leaders don’t actually have a lot of time to spend with their staff, chatting with their staff. So I think that’s a key problem. They go from meeting to meeting and from crisis to crisis. And so they’re not actually spending the time with people. That’s at one end of the spectrum. I think at the other end of the spectrum, from a university perspective, we have very, very smart, highly trained, highly motivated people that come out of with health degrees. And then they’re put in a system where there’s a lack of autonomy and a freedom to speak up.

Pieter Walker:

And we see that particularly with medicine, some of the allied health professions and nursing, that they are highly trained, smart, young people who don’t then get the opportunity to exercise their thought as they have at university. So that’s another reason. I think another one of the reason is that the workplaces are very stressful, and from the work that I do, we’ve been able to analyze and show that about 80% of the steps in most processes add little to no value. And about 30 to 40% of any health professional’s time is completely wasted.

Danielle Mik:

Oh, that’s huge.

Pieter Walker:

So you take this highly group of trained people and put them into broken systems and broken processes, and they’re not allowed to question authority and why they do things in a certain way, I think that leads to a lot of burnout.

Danielle Mik:

So Pieter, do you find then the work that you are doing by reviewing those processes, it actually reduces mental health injuries?

Pieter Walker:

Yes. And we’ve got some data that shows that it actually reduces absenteeism in the workplace quite significantly, and turnover. Some of the work that we’ve done in residential aged care, for example, we’ve shown that it’s had a massive improvement in turnover rates. We’ve reduced sick leave and absenteeism by 50, 60% in some organizations by doing some of this work.

Danielle Mik:

Wow. That’s enormous. So what, Pieter, do you see as the biggest challenges in this sector to achieving mentally healthy workplaces? And I’m sure obviously, it varies from organization to organization, but are there some general themes of what you think are the biggest challenges?

Pieter Walker:

Yeah. So I think that actually giving senior staff time to work on this is one of the biggest challenges and changing the culture. So we spend a lot of time in healthcare. Healthcare is made up of two words, health and care, and we spend of our time on the health, and I’m sure you find outside the field as well, and not so much on the care component.

Danielle Mik:

Yes.

Pieter Walker:

It’s 90, 95% technical training and not a lot on the care component. And then trying to introduce that into people whose occupation is very technically based, in many instances, to focus on the care component, to take that time out, to sit and chat, use some of those key principles of emotional intelligence of understanding the emotions of others and managing the emotions of others. It’s hard to do when you’re in these high pressure cooker environments. In fact, some of the training trains you to not be emotion in the workplace, and to take that out by the very nature of the job. But as you progress, as you know Danielle, through the ranks and into a leadership position, your job is people management.

Danielle Mik:

Absolutely.

Pieter Walker:

And many healthcare professionals, have all the technical training and get promoted on their technical expertise. And then all of a sudden I’m managing large groups of people, which takes a very different skillset.

Danielle Mik:

That’s a great point, Pete. I think a lot of people probably wouldn’t think about that too much. But no, you’re absolutely right. That really highlights an important point. So do you find that there are particular groups of workers in the sector that seem to be experiencing mental health conditions more than other groups of workers?

Pieter Walker:

So according to the literature, psychiatrists have one at the highest suicide rates, which I think is by very nature of the work that they do. We also seem to see much higher turnover rates in senior executives. Again, I think because of the stress of the work that they do.

Danielle Mik:

Yeah. And that’s interesting, because I would think that a lot of people might immediately, the first thought that might come to mind is, the workers that have got direct sort of contact with patients that are troublesome, people that with dementia and things like that, that might be bigger issues. But it’s interesting that you say, you see in the executive sector that it’s really high.

Pieter Walker:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Again, because of the stresses that they’re under. And I think for some of the, certainly, senior medical staff and some of the junior staff as well, there’s a lack of opportunity to debrief if there’s been a clinical event that people are just kind of told to soldier on. Without the opportunity to sit and reflect and debrief and have another professional help them through that process. They wing a lot of that debriefing that goes on.

Danielle Mik:

If you could make a few suggestions for employers that were in this sector that you think are pivotal, or that the basic core foundation to successfully creating a mentally healthy workplace, what would they be? What are your top notch items for employers?

Pieter Walker:

So I think the first one is spend time with your employees. We encourage leadership walk arounds, and spending time connecting with people, getting to understand them at all levels of the organization. So that would be my number one thing to do is to actually make time to do it. I think that the second thing is to make sure that we’ve got good leadership training and succession planning. In healthcare, we tend not to do a lot of succession planning and people act in the roles, and they don’t have the skills before we promote them. In some instances, we promote them, they’re there for four or five years and then we train them. So I think we’ve got a lot to learn from some other industries in terms of our leadership and succession planning.

Pieter Walker:

Focusing on human factors and the things that drive us in the workplace. And obviously, from my perspective, we spend a lot of time on systems thinking. We know that about 20% of most management’s time is spent on reactive improvement. And we want to change that around to have that 20%, which is two hours a day of time spent on proactive strategy and proactive quality improvement in the workplace. The walk around. Being a leader, we see most managers in healthcare just have their days filled with meetings and emails and not a lot of time to focus on the human factors.

Danielle Mik:

So sort of being able to translate from worrying about bureaucratic processes to more being people facing and people interacting?

Pieter Walker:

Absolutely. Absolutely. And then providing people with, one, the tools that they need to do the job, and feedback on the work that they do. We talk about common purpose, common understanding and common language, and making sure that everyone in the organization understands their connection to the organization. I think that causes a lot of stress. When you just come to work and do your job without having that connection to the organization and how it operates in the work that you do… People want to feel valued, right? So that would be my other tip. And we spent a lot of time talking about how we bring joy and happiness into the workplace, how we identify and make things fun, and value people. Reinforce the positive things that they do rather than take the punitive approach because they haven’t met a particular KPI.

Danielle Mik:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, Pete, is there any other sort of magical tips or pearls of wisdom that you’d like to add, that we haven’t covered yet?

Pieter Walker:

No, I think those are some of my pillars. Get to know the people that you work with and don’t set people up to fail, set them up to succeed by making sure you’ve got the right… with the right training in place. And joy and fun in the workplace, as many organizations, many of them multinationals that now starting to discover, is one of the key strategies, I think, to a workplace that is good to be in where you could reduce mental health.

Danielle Mik:

Yeah. Well, it’s interesting because we started, we had the revelation that children learn better through games and playing rather than through formalized processes. And I think we realized that well, adults are just big children really. And so a lot of those things still apply. So fun and games still activates our brain in a very positive way to learning.

Danielle Mik:

So look, thank you very much for your time. That’s really illuminating, and love to chat with you further about this at some point, maybe we can do this again.

Pieter Walker:

Would love to. Thanks Danielle. Thanks for having me.

Danielle Mik:

Thanks very much, Pete. Take care.

Pieter Walker:

Take care.

Danielle Mik:

Bye.