Impossible to plan one’s private life due to overtime, health care workers warn.

At four o’clock on Thursday afternoon, the Vårförbundet’s blockade came into effect. It means that 63,000 nurses, midwives, biomedical analysts and X-ray nurses will no longer be able to take any extra shifts or work overtime. Instead, they should go home on time – and also be able to be sure that they are actually free when the work shift is over.

Read more: Vårdförbundet goes into extensive blockade – 63,000 members refuse overtime

Something that has so far been impossible, according to Andrea Marklund, who works as an ambulance nurse at Aisab Söder in Stockholm.

– I can never plan anything in the hours after my shift ends. It simply doesn’t work. It leads to a great deal of uncertainty – and my partner is very upset that I never come home on time, she says and continues:

– Almost none of my colleagues plan anything after the end of the work shift. We simply do not know when the working day is over.

Andrea Marklund’s situation is also far from unique. According to the Vårdförbundet’s calculations, the members accumulated a total of three million overtime hours last year. And the overtime also has considerably more far-reaching consequences, says Andrea Marklund.

– As it is now, many nurses cannot bear to work full time. People lose time because they can’t get their lives together and the number of sick leave, exhaustion depression and mental illness increases. Unfortunately, many also leave their jobs and start doing something else because they can’t take it, not least the young people who don’t see a future here. And given that we are getting an increasingly elderly population in Sweden, I don’t understand how we are going to get it together.

That many nurses choose to leave their job because of the pressured work situation and the growing mountain of overtime also risks leading to a loss of skills within the profession, says Andra Marklund.

– Since there is a lack of people, newly graduated nurses are employed in places such as the emergency department and the cardiac intensive care unit, where they have to take care of the absolutely sickest patients and manage to sift through them. But they do not have the so-called clinical eye, which requires a few years of experience to acquire.

– So I see the risk of a reduction in competence, as the more experienced nurses change jobs when they can’t take it anymore, she says.

How long the care blockade will continue – and how it may affect patients – is currently unclear. On the part of the Vårdförbundet, among other things, they are demanding an extensive reduction in working hours – something that SKR sees as impossible due to the regions’ and municipalities’ difficult finances and because it is already difficult to recruit nurses.

Read more: Sweden’s largest hospital is reorganizing to meet the blockade

Andrea Marklund, who is also a union representative and safety representative at her workplace, believes that in the end it is about both working life and life outside the workplace having to be sustainable.

– I hope that those who negotiate understand that we are serious. And I think that all the people out there in society are with us. We received a lot of applause during the pandemic, but we want more than applause, she says.

– Many say that they have received such good care and have not seen how pressured the situation is in the hospitals – which also makes me happy. Because I’m happy that a woman about to give birth doesn’t see that the midwife hasn’t had time to eat or pee. But what if people knew what it really looks like behind the scenes. If they really understood how much we toil there.