Abstract
This article offers the lived experiences of an NHS doctor working on the front line in an English NHS Trust during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. The overall aim of the article is to offer a context-specific perspective on the employee experience of burnout by drawing out the interplay of organisational and external/socio-political factors during an atypical time. The narrative also highlights an as yet unexplored pattern of burnout with active maintenance of professional efficacy as the starting point which then interacts with high levels of work intensification prevalent in the NHS, leading to the coping mechanisms of depersonalisation and detachment. Existing research has predominantly focused on how/why employees experience burnout at the organisational level of analysis, leaving a gap in the literature on how external/socio-political and time contexts may impact employee burnout.
Highlights
This personal account of Dr Elizabeth Waterson’s work on the front line in an English NHS Trust during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, including her contracting the virus, aims to highlight the unique manifestation of burnout during atypical times
Job burnout refers to mental, emotional and physical exhaustion (Cordes and Dougherty, 1993) and is seen less as a medical condition and more as a syndrome tied to occupational stressors (World Health Organization (WHO), 2019)
This emphasis on job-related stress distinguishes burnout from the more meta-category of stress and emphasises specific types/patterns of stress that arise in response to high levels of uncertainty or because highly significant work outcomes are at stake (Cordes and Dougherty, 1993)
Summary
This personal account of Dr Elizabeth Waterson’s work on the front line in an English NHS Trust during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, including her contracting the virus, aims to highlight the unique manifestation of burnout during atypical times. Job burnout refers to mental, emotional and physical exhaustion (Cordes and Dougherty, 1993) and is seen less as a medical condition and more as a syndrome tied to occupational stressors (World Health Organization (WHO), 2019). This emphasis on job-related stress distinguishes burnout from the more meta-category of stress and emphasises specific types/patterns of stress that arise in response to high levels of uncertainty or because highly significant work outcomes are at stake (Cordes and Dougherty, 1993). In this article Dr Waterson’s lived experience is mobilised to extend burnout research in two key ways
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