If you’re a healthcare leader, ask yourself this: Have we started applauding workforce resilience when we should be calling out workforce exploitation? For years now, the word resilience has become a badge of honour in healthcare. We celebrate our nurses, doctors, and allied health professionals for pushing through burnout, working double shifts, staying calm through crises, and holding it all together under impossible circumstances. But here’s the truth: aren’t many of the things we call “resilience” actually symptoms of a broken system? And worse – by glorifying it, we might actually be complicit in normalising workplace exploitation?
Resilience: A Shield or a Smokescreen?
Available literature suggests that approximately more than 50% of healthcare workers report symptoms of burnout – with the majority often citing chronic understaffing, poor system design, and excessive workloads as root causes.
And yet what is the response in many systems?
- More resilience training.
- More “wellbeing” sessions.
- More “listening” on executive roundings.
- And more thank you cards given out with lollipops.
Meanwhile:
- Staffing ratios remain unchanged.
- Roster gaps widen.
- Workload increases.
- Unfilled vacancies multiply.
- Cost controls delay backfilling people.
- And the emotional toll intensifies.
From Celebrating Heroes to Creating Martyrs
When we celebrate or thank a nurse for working double or triple shifts, we’re not recognising resilience. We’re normalising unsafe conditions. When a doctor works 12 days straight because there’s no cover, and we reward them with praise instead of a policy fix — we’re rewarding system failure.
Resilience becomes a convenient but dangerous narrative when it allows leaders and systems to look away from the root causes of workforce distress. It’s the equivalent of applauding someone for swimming while they’re drowning, instead of throwing them a rope.
What Healthcare Leaders Must Confront
As executives and health system stewards, it’s time to ask: Are we solving the problems or managing the optics?
If our teams need resilience programs to survive their jobs, we haven’t built a functional workforce model.
If the only way services can continue is by relying on good will of the clinicians at the risk of psychological injury, we haven’t built a sustainable system.
Resilience should be the backup parachute, not the flight plan.
As executives and health system stewards, it’s time to ask: Are we solving the problems or managing the optics?
If our teams need resilience programs to survive their jobs, we haven’t built a functional workforce model. Resilience should be the backup parachute, not the flight plan.
If the only way services can continue is by relying on good will of the clinicians at the risk of psychological injury, we haven’t built a sustainable system.
That means:
- Addressing staffing ratios with evidence-based, enforceable standards.
- Redesigning rosters that prioritise rest, recovery, and predictability.
- Embedding psychosocial safety not just as a compliance checkbox, but as a strategic imperative.
- Listening to lived experience from the front lines and resourcing accordingly.
We shouldn’t stop recognising the strength of our healthcare workforce.
But resilience is a human response to adversity.
It’s not a justification for perpetuating it.
If we continue to praise the capacity to endure harm without committing to systemic repair, then we’re crossing a line. And it’s up to healthcare leaders to draw it back.
The question isn’t how resilient our workforce is. The question is: why do they have to be?
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