I'm an occupational therapist working at a hospital in germany. The last two years have been a really huge struggle for my team and myself, since the numbers of patients have been reduced and we had to shift over to help out on other occasions. We stood guard at the enteance, checking the people entering (hearing lots of complaints and insults when we had to send them away), took covid-testings in the drive-in, helped the nurses on the covid-station (in full protective clothing for several hours) by prepping meals, feeding patients, contact their family-members, looked after medicinal material, sewed covid-masks, even gave up our therapy-room to store masks and gloves. We worked on weekends, which is not the case in general, skipped holidays due to infected colleagues and used up a lot of pre-made overtime to leave early when there just was not enough to do for us. Nobody from management ever came to us to say thank you. Also, we had big issued to get our therapy-room back, since the entering-code had been changed by the-f*ck-knows-who without telling us.
Our team consisted of five therapists including myself. Two have left this year, one april 1st, other july 1st – right when our chief doctors and management decided to crank the patientnumbers up to the absolute limit. We told everybody in charge we struggle really hard to keep up with our work and that its us in need of help now. We reached out in all directions, but only managed to find one new therapist starting on sept 1st. Until then we have to reduce the amount of therapy-time per patient, skip tasks like cleaning, prepping, exchange with co-workers, supervision etc. Every shift is a big hassle when we see theres even mire work to do we can't finish.
Management did not react. Chief doctors told us to work overtime as much as we can. Nothingbis done for us, no one is stepping in. I feel burnt out after just a couple of weeks and had an interview last week at a retirement home, but sadly they did not call again …