Healthcare systems across Europe are running on overtime, according to data gathered by trade unions. Chronic staff shortages – themselves a result of public budget cuts and political choices – lead nearly a third of healthcare workers to regularly exceed their contracted working hours. The situation has not improved since the COVID-19 pandemic, as highlighted by the European Federation of Public Service Unions (EPSU) in a series of activities launched around April 7, World Health Day.
“Longstanding understaffing, low pay, and poor workforce planning have created a system increasingly reliant on health and care workers – especially nurses and healthcare assistants – stretching their shifts, cancelling rest time, and making themselves available at short notice to keep services running,” EPSU stated. The union warns that this situation is no accident, but a well-known and documented consequence of health systems operating under the logic of austerity.
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Dependence on overtime is widespread throughout the region, with reports from countries including Uzbekistan, Germany, and Italy illustrating how healthcare workers routinely sacrifice their own well-being to ensure care is provided to patients. As a result, nearly one in three health workers report being too exhausted to perform basic household tasks at the end of their shifts – many even lack the energy to spend time with their children.
“I leave home at 6 am, change three different vehicles, and arrive at the hospital by 8 pm. My shift ends depending on the patients. My wife works under the same conditions. Our parents look after our child. By the time we get home, she is already asleep,” shared an anesthesia technician from Turkey. “Almost all my wife’s salary goes to rent, while mine covers essential expenses and our child’s basic needs. If one of us quits, we won’t be able to make ends meet. But if we both keep working, our child will grow up without spending time with us!”
In Greece, some hospital staff say they have only managed to take 15 days off in three years due to mass staff shortages in public healthcare. Meanwhile, nurses in Finland report that “supervisors seem to think that unpaid overtime is an acceptable operating model.”
Read more: How Berlin’s health workers organized, went on strike, and won
Workers stress that solving the crisis requires solutions as systemic as the problems themselves. They are demanding an end to austerity in healthcare, the introduction of mandatory safe staffing levels, and investment in improving working conditions. Many have already taken action and achieved important victories – from the Charité hospital strike in Berlin in 2021 to the Swedish Association of Health Professionals’ successful 2024 boycott of voluntary overtime, which lasted nearly 80 days and resulted in commitments for increased nurse training and stronger protections for those working nights.
With new cuts to social services looming as many European countries prioritize rearmament, mobilizations by health workers are likely to grow – and they can count on a resounding message: true security is built through care, not through tanks and guns.
People’s Health Dispatch is a fortnightly bulletin published by the People’s Health Movement and Peoples Dispatch. For more articles and to subscribe to People’s Health Dispatch, click here.
