Colleague handbook · Section 9
Your wellbeing.
Guidance from the clinic on rest, shift work, and what colleagues sometimes notice.
Rest
Night shifts are part of ordinary rotation and most colleagues adjust within a fortnight. Until you do, expect to feel slightly out of step with the day. This is normal and it passes.
If you cannot account for an hour, that is not a symptom. Everybody has hours they cannot account for. The clinic is interested only in the pattern, never the hour.
What colleagues sometimes notice
A corridor that reads longer than you remember it. A door on a landing you have used for months. A room that seems to hold one more person than it does, briefly, at the edge of the eye.
These reports are common, they are well understood, and the clinic regards them as unremarkable features of shift work in an unfamiliar building. They resolve on their own in almost every case.
Colleagues are asked not to compare notes on this. Not because it is discouraged, but because agreement between two tired people is very easy to reach and very hard to undo.
If it happens
- Note the time. The time is the useful part; what you saw is not.
- Continue at your normal pace. Do not run, and do not stop.
- Do not go back to check. Nothing is gained by checking and colleagues report that checking makes the week harder.
- Mention it at your next appointment, or do not. Both are fine. It will be logged either way.
If you remember differently, that does not mean you remember incorrectly.
Disagreements about what happened
Occasionally a colleague will not remember a conversation that you remember clearly, or will remember one that you do not. This is upsetting the first time and ordinary after that.
Where accounts differ, both are recorded. The Foundation does not adjudicate between two colleagues' memories and has never seen the value in trying. You are not asked to agree. You are only asked to be kind about it.
A note on worry
Nothing described on this page is unusual at Providence. We are aware of how that sentence reads, and we have decided to leave it in, because colleagues have told us the alternative — saying nothing at all — was worse.
Clinic notices — appointment cards, extended hours, reissues — are posted outside the refectory with everything else. The noticeboard →
The clinic publishes a small number of colleague accounts each year so that new colleagues can see what is ordinary. Read a published account →