Image: Dr Geoff Toogood
Crazy Socks 4 Docs Day is Friday 7 June 2024. You are invited to wear colourful or crazy socks and post photographs on social media on that day. Although this is only one day of the year, AMA Victoria always campaigns for the need to protect your mental health at work and to decrease stigma for all health professionals experiencing mental health issues every day of the year.
On the first Friday in June 2017 Dr Geoff Toogood, AMA Victoria Board member and consultant cardiologist, launched the first Crazy Socks 4 Docs Day and for the first time we saw social media posts of health professionals wearing colourful socks. The day aims to create an awareness movement to break down the stigma faced by health professionals who experience mental health issues. Geoff launched this movement as he had faced significant discrimination and stigma at many levels in association with his personal lived experience of depression and anxiety. The crazy socks theme reflects comments which were made by colleagues questioning his mental health status, using the word “crazy,” when he wore unmatched socks. These comments were made behind his back but overheard. The reason for his unmatched socks was a new puppy in his household who enjoyed chewing socks.
In seven years since that first Crazy Socks 4 Docs Day, momentum has increased and the campaign has become mainstream, with an international reach. Many Australian healthcare workplaces celebrate the day and hold events which draw attention to the importance of wellbeing. Some hold a view that these days are tokenistic and that the mental health and wellbeing of health professionals is ignored for the rest of the year. It is true that stigma and discrimination continue, and we need to address many structural and systemic issues in healthcare workplaces to ensure that health professionals can optimise their mental health and wellbeing. Workload, rosters, unpaid overtime, and safe working hours all need to be addressed. We also need to improve workplace culture, provide psychological safety, and eliminate bullying. There is still a lot of work to be done and AMA Victoria and many other groups representing health professionals continue to advocate on these issues to employers and to government as a priority.
In the broader Australian community, there has been a growing awareness too and the introduction of legislation mandating that psychosocial risk in workplaces must be minimised and that employers have a duty to ensure that workplace health and safety extends to mental health as well as physical health. Psychosocial hazards are factors in the design or management of work that increase the risk of work-related stress and can lead to psychological or physical harm. WorkSafe Victoria has introduced guidance to help employers identify features in work design or management that may increase risks of work-related stress and psychological or physical harm. WorkSafe Victoria has listed the following psychosocial hazards:
- Low job control
- High and low job demands
- Poor support
- Poor organisational change management
- Poor organisational justice
- Low role clarity
- Poor workplace relationships
- Poor environmental conditions
- Remote and isolated work
- Violent or traumatic events.
Many of these psychosocial hazards are common in healthcare workplaces, thus increasing the risk of psychosocial injury for health professionals. Campaigns to raise awareness of the need to look after the mental health and wellbeing of all health professionals are still needed. Healthcare workplaces need to continually review the roles of all workers to ensure that they are well designed, to ensure not only good patient care but also that workers are protected from harm due to their work. For example, admission and discharge targets must also consider the workload of the doctors required to care for patients and review how administrative tasks can be streamlined to alleviate the pressure on doctors due to increased patient throughput. Healthcare workplaces need to focus on steps to improve culture to ensure that bullying does result in communication failure with subsequent risk to patients plus psychological harm to the team members involved. Respect for all is essential. Healthcare workers need to be supported appropriately around the stress and trauma they are exposed to with access to peer support and debriefing, quiet break out rooms which are clean and well-furnished for recovery after an incident, access to healthy food options during periods when workload demand is high and managers who demonstrate they care about team wellbeing by checking in with everyone. Most importantly doctors and healthcare workers need to be consulted about the best way to address the psychosocial hazards in their workplaces. Empowerment and self-determination are essential for wellbeing.
Crazy Socks 4 Docs continues to be a much-needed awareness movement as we still have lots of work to do. We need to put on our crazy socks every year until health professionals are better protected from psychosocial hazards and until we can talk about our mental health concerns without fear of discrimination or stigma.