Healthcare workers are some of the most highly trained professionals in the world. They need to be able to cope with difficult and stressful situations, and they often receive special training to help them do so. This training can include coaching, counseling, and other forms of support.

There are, for instance, coaching techniques to help with burnout. This is something every nurse and many health professionals need to be mindful of as they take on more and more responsibility within their section. If we are looking to further our careers then we are more likely to come across burnout among colleagues at that level.

We cannot, however, let the thought of burnout hold us back from progressing. Not when there are techniques that we can learn to help us combat the stress-induced condition. It can be a matter of prioritizing or delegating sometimes when we are in charge so that we are not taking on more than is reasonable. Also, learning how to cope with emotions, because being mentally exhausted can affect the physical side of our bodies too.

What health workers have to cope with

Healthcare workers often deal with difficult and emotional situations. They may see patients who are very ill, or who have died. They may also deal with families who are grieving. This can be extremely stressful.

If you are the one who has to break the bad news to a patient’s relative, then it can be very upsetting indeed, and hard to erase from your memory to carry on. It is possible, though, and a technique that staff in healthcare will learn through courses that talk about coping and burnout techniques.

The help that is out there for healthcare staff

To help healthcare workers cope with these stressors, they receive special training. This training can include coaching, counseling, and other forms of support. Health workers often find this training to be very helpful. It can help them to deal with difficult situations, and to understand their own emotions.

Workers who receive this training often feel more prepared to deal with difficult situations. They also report feeling more supported by their healthcare organization and able to deal with patients, in particular, more effectively.

Training

Much of the training in the medical profession is on the job, although courses can be attended at other hospitals that have the specialist training set-ups in place and the expertise in-house.

This kind of training is more about how to do the job itself. Teaching, for example, nurses how to give injections and use specialist equipment. It does not, however, always teach them how to cope with responsibility that goes beyond their initial nurse training. This is where coaching comes in.

Coaching

Coaching will take the form of executive coaching that teaches those in higher-level positions, who will carry the most responsibility, to cope with the present in terms of managing their time and emotions. Also, in how to set goals for the future that are entirely attainable.

Counseling

Beyond coaching, there is counseling where a staff member gets to talk through their concerns with someone impartial rather than who is perhaps an integral part of their working team. Some are concerned this will hamper their career and so clam up in front of those superior to them.

It is good to talk, as they say, and things people find themselves saying out loud are often interpreted differently from inside their heads. When we think more about things, they don’t seem so bad after all. Time is a great healer too if there has been a particularly upsetting incident that a nurse has been a part of.

Bearing all of the above in mind, training for healthcare workers such as nurses can go beyond basic training and extend into the emotional side of nursing as well as the more advanced and practical skills needed. There is a lot of patient trauma to deal with and a nurse needs to be able to turn their emotions on and off between home and work and be able to juggle their job commitments between both. Executive coaching can teach nurses in positions of great responsibility how to do just that.