A real story about carer fatigue and burnout

Around one million unpaid family carers and 200,000 paid health and support workers live and work in rural, regional and remote Australia.

A significant number report fatigue and burnout – and the numbers are growing.

Rural areas are under greater pressure, with shortages across the health professions and difficulty recruiting and retaining staff, leaving existing workers overloaded and shifting unmet need onto family carers already struggling.

I was a rural psychologist in south-west Victoria for over twenty years, until a stroke forced me to retire from clinical practice.

I believe work-related chronic stress was the primary factor in me becoming unwell.

Before the stroke, I was diagnosed with PTSD and had two bouts of pneumonia, the second bad enough that I coughed a stress fracture into my spine and wore a metal brace for five months.

Each time, I went back to work as soon as I could, still working long hours with few breaks, because demand from my clients, our GPs, and our community did not let up.

I wasn’t the only health professional feeling the pressure.

Doctors would call routinely, virtually begging me to see their depressed patient, and despite a nine-week wait, I always would.

Until I couldn’t.

At times I supported the doctors themselves, who were struggling too. Two doctors I worked closely with died by suicide.

Burnout is at epidemic proportions, and with funding cuts and greater reliance on unpaid carers, more are becoming critically unwell.

Very recently, the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Journal reported researchers calling for urgent action on graduate nurse burnout, a key driver of attrition in the first year of practice.

During my recovery, I felt compelled to act and spent four years researching and developing an evidence-based course on burnout prevention and recovery.

Making it online mattered so that rural and remote practitioners, support workers and unpaid carers could reach practical strategies easily and perhaps avoid the path I took.

The course covers ground that generic ‘burnout training’ omits; early childhood factors and attachment style, trauma and the multiple levels of stress affecting carers – most of whom are women.

I also wanted carers and managers to understand that psychosocial health at work is a shared responsibility.

At the Royal Flying Doctor Service, an organisation that lived its values, I had the best managers of my working life. They encouraged me to reduce my client load and prioritise self-care.

I didn’t.

Reflection also showed me my overworking began in early life, which I believe is true for many drawn to caring roles.

I have delivered the course multiple times in Victoria with outstandingly positive feedback yet find it difficult to persuade health and carer organisations to fund access.

Several say their budgets don’t allow for it, though the course is just $125 per person including a 113-page workbook valued at $45, or $79 when delivered online with a downloadable workbook.

Some organisations have responded to burnout by engaging speakers on resilience or mindfulness, which – at best – inadvertently overlooks what is often a systemic problem, and at worst seems to suggest that carer distress is a personal flaw – “you need to learn how to cope better.”

In my experience, most carers who reach that point have been too resilient for too long, often for years, pushing through chronic understaffing and unsustainable workloads with too few resources.

Resilience or mindfulness training may help in the short term, but it doesn’t deal with the source of the stress.

Hence the subtitle of my workbook, “When Candles, Baths and Massages Just Won’t Cut It.“

With an ageing population, demand will only escalate.

We must prioritise the health and wellbeing of all carers as a matter of urgency, to prevent further attrition and harm.