This article by Yiannis Gabriel thinks about anxiety and organizations – social context with a psycho-dynamic-analytical approach as researched by Isabel Menzies Lyth. https://www.academia.edu/14309...NZIES_LYTH_1917_2008
That’s a pretty rare focus for us these days in adult mental health, but worthy of its efforts to address our actual emotional feelings, whatever you think of psycho-dynamic constructs. It looks at a health care context and while reflecting on research on nurses, can be applied to any of us, including managers/leaders.
(image from: http://www.melanie-klein-trust.org.uk/menzies-lyth)
It brings us to think about individual and organizational responses, the unhelpful one’s and suggests more helpful approaches. I found that it could help me out on how to manage my individual rich pool of anxiety involved with individual, family, care system… interactions that lead to: the good, the bad patient, the good, the bad clinician.
The unbearable, which in turn leads us to approaches/stances/practices that are defensive and are intricately linked to group/program/organizational contexts manifested under the heading of: bureaucracy.-
“…its rules, rota’s, task lists, checks, counterchecks, hierarchies … for defensive techniques. By allowing for ritual task performance by depersonalizing relations with the patients, by using organizational hierarchies, nurses contain their anxiety. Thus a patient becomes “the kidney in bed 14 or “the tracheotomy in ward B”, …
Rules, task lists, checks, themselves are for sure critical to good care, it is when we pour our focus onto them, that we loose ourselves and the people we are caring for. So this article is not a threat to practice change advocates and implementors and instead helps out the process approach.
The article says a lot more, but a little silly of me if I am trying to summarize a summary of a summary. In the current work force context where organizations are deploying campaigns for individual worker wellness and stress management, it would be great to hear from others about resources that help us to reflect on the individual in a care organization, but beyond the usual individual approaches - of: take a break, exercise, ... take a bubble bath.
Please look at the article here: https://abetternhs.files.wordp...h_a_crucial_task.pdf