Groote Schuur is one of the first South African hospitals to bring on a full-time Staff Psychologist to aid frontline healthcare workers during these trying times!
Cape Town, South Africa (16 November 2021) – Heroes of Groote Schuur is a Facebook page dedicated to highlighting the amazing people who work or visit the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town.
The page highlights all the incredible work being done by the staff who keep everything running smoothly. Heroes featured on the page often have the most interesting jobs, especially now during the pandemic when so much was up in the air.
The latest features give the doctors, nurses and other frontline workers at the hospital the chance to share their stories. This time they honour Dr Lane Benjamin, the resident Clinical Psychologist for the staff and faculty.
The team shared that Dr Benjamin is one of the first Psychologists in SA to be hired specifically to assist hospital staff through any practice trauma, grief and burnout.
“I had been talking to the health department a few years ago about trauma in practice, and how to shift people’s wellbeing through understanding the lens of trauma, and I think serendipitously that conversation was taking place and then Covid happened, and it kind of opened up the way for this post to be created.
It’s a lot about looking at how trauma impacts peoples’ wellbeing and their relationships, and then infrastructure and systems. Because this is a new post I’m having to shape it and talking to a lot of people about what they understand I should be doing.
From day one I’ve been seeing people individually and also being pulled into wards which is often crisis work and reactive work. So that’s one part of it. And the other part is developing interventions and processes to help teams become stronger and departments to think a bit more systemically.
For me, even before I came to the hospital, I’ve been very aware that our country is not dealing with grief. I think that it’s there but people don’t know how to verbalise it. And we have to articulate and acknowledge what this grief is doing to all of us. For me that’s critical.
And then obviously the burnout which I again understand as sustained trauma. And that’s normal. The burnout for me now that it’s an official diagnosis is a double-edged sword because it makes a person feel like individually they aren’t coping when actually it’s a systemic issue, it’s much broader than you just not having the resources. So I still frame it as it’s chronic stress and trauma that is individual and around in the culture.
My main job here is to give people a sense of hope, and keep that hope alive. And I think that’s what a lot of the staff need, because they feel so demoralised by not just what they’re seeing, but also what’s happening on the outside, the pressure, the moral trauma and anti-vaxxers, and all of those kinds of things that affect their feelings of hope and purpose.
It’s really amazing that the hospital has created this post and I’ve been researching all over just to find some other evidence-based practice for just some of the projects I want to introduce to staff and I can’t find anything in a hospital setting, definitely not a dedicated staff psychologist anywhere in the world, so it’s very exciting.” – Dr Lane Benjamin, Clinical Psychologist
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