Accident and Emergency (A&E) medicine is a challenging, fast-paced and rewarding specialty for any doctor considering this path in medicine.

You’ll manage the full and varied spectrum of emergencies at any hour of the day or night. A&E is the hub of any NHS acute hospital. Open 24/7, 365 days a year, yes, it is demanding, but it is the place for a doctor who thrives on helping people at their most vulnerable, working on the frontline and craves the fast pace of the rapid response of emergency medicine. Often referred to as the ‘adrenaline rush’, there’s one thing for sure, you’ll never feel bored!

In this piece, we take a deep dive into A&E departments and the challenges across the UK. Did you know that there are different types of A&E departments in the UK?

As a healthcare professional, it can be incredibly hard to “switch off” once you return home from the job. Your work makes a vital difference to the lives and health of your patients, so it’s no surprise that the events of the day (whether uplifting or draining) often stick with you long after you have ended your shift.

You spend all day putting other people first, so when you end your shift, it is crucial that you put your wellbeing first – We underpin all that makes us successful by putting people first. We know as caring and giving healthcare workers that you are a novice to putting yourself first, but it is vital that you do in order to avoid stress and ultimate burnout.

We think it’s essential to keep the conversation going regarding our healthcare flexible workforce’s mental health and wellbeing. Today, we’d like to examine some of the resources available to you. Sometimes less is more and keeping things simple can be difficult. So, with thousands of wellbeing and mental health apps floating around, we decided to make things a little easier and research the most relevant ones we think may be beneficial to you.

The apps we’ll be exploring are Headspace, Unmind, Sleepio, and Daylight – our four favs!

As the saying goes, ‘it’s okay not to be okay’, we need to open up and start talking about what really matters in life.

Before the events of 2020, people’s mental health in the UK was believed to be in poor condition. After the events of the pandemic, with lockdowns, isolation, fear, worry, stress, anxiety, financial troubles, political unrest, weight gain, substance abuse, and more besides, our mental health suffered even more and is in critical condition.

As a result of declining mental health and numerous other stressors, suicide rates here in the UK are up alarmingly high, and that is something that must change.

Suicide is a topic that is still, even in this day and age, considered taboo and uncomfortable to discuss, yet the more we understand about it, the more we can do to help bring suicide rates down in this country and save lives. So let’s get chatting!

If there’s one thing that 2020 highlighted for us here in the U.K., it’s that without our flexible healthcare professionals, life as we know it would be much, much harder than it is now.

The global Coronavirus pandemic of 2020, and 2021 for that matter, proved just how important a robust Health Service in this country is. Due to COVID-19, our healthcare system has and continues to face some significant challenges. The truth of the matter is that, without substantial investments and meaningful commitment from the government to address the current crippling workforce challenges, our NHS will continue to remain overwhelmed, and burnout rates will continue to increase amongst our healthcare colleagues.

Not only do healthcare workers have to continue to deal with the threat and repercussions of COVID, but there are also vast backlogs of patients to get through because operations, treatments, screenings, and hospital visits were all but postponed throughout much of 2020. As a result of this, flexible workforce solutions are in higher demand than ever before, this not only by healthcare providers due to significant workforce shortages, but now more than ever driven as a choice by healthcare workers to support a better work-life balance, which is what we’re looking at today.