During Mental Health Awareness Week, Tom Delahunt reflects on the emotional realities of working in healthcare, and why wellbeing must remain part of the conversation.

Much of the discussion around healthcare is centred on performance, pressure, and recovery. Waiting times, staffing shortages, and stretched services dominate headlines and policy debates. These matter, but beneath those conversations sits something quieter, and far more human: the emotional experience of providing care. Every day, healthcare professionals carry responsibility, grief, uncertainty, compassion, and resilience, often all within the same shift.

As a Senior Lecturer in Nursing at Canterbury Christ Church University, and formerly an A&E nurse, I have spent years working in spaces where life changes quickly. Alongside this, my doctoral research explores how creative practices, poetry, storytelling, and visual expression can support the emotional lives of nurses. What this work consistently reveals is simple: systems only function when the people within them are able to endure, reflect, and remain connected to meaning.

Nursing is not only technical work. It is emotional labour. Nurses witness trauma, loss, uncertainty, and recovery, often on the same day. When that emotional weight is not processed, it does not disappear. It stays.

Traditional support structures such as supervision and mentorship remain essential. But under increasing pressure, they are often stretched. What I have found, both in practice and research, is that creative spaces offer something different. Not as interventions, but as opportunities. Spaces where experiences can be translated, through metaphor, image, or narrative, into something that can be held, shared, and understood.

This matters because emotional sustenance is not separate from professional capability; it underpins it. A nurse who feels able to process what they carry is more able to care safely, think clearly, and remain within the profession.

In my teaching, particularly in nursing and social justice, students are not asking for less challenge. They are asking for depth. They want to understand who they are within the system, not just how to function within it. When space is made for this, something shifts. Confidence grows, but so does compassion.

Humanism in healthcare is often framed as an ideal. Something aspirational. But in the current climate, it is far more practical than that. It is a condition of sustainability.

If we continue to focus only on systems, we risk overlooking the very people those systems depend upon. Supporting the emotional and creative lives of nurses is not an optional addition to healthcare; it is part of what allows it to continue.

Tom Delahunt is a Senior Lecturer in School of Nursing, Midwifery, Allied and Public Health. Read Tom’s recent publication about how philosophy, art, and phenomenology can help nursing education heal trauma.