Work and reasonable adjustments

Lissy02 said:

I brought up some reasonable adjustments but was told it’s practically impossible in my line of work

Can you tell us what reasonable adjustments you have asked for?

I can imagine that in most areas of healthcare there will be a lot of environmental aspects that cannot be changed and a huge amount of unpredictability when dealing with the public, all of which will make this really difficult for some autists to cope with.

If you have a back office role with no responsibilities for rapid turn around of test results etc then you have a good chance of requesting something to be done, but most other roles will be much more difficult.

If you can let us know what sort of role you have and what is most overwhelming for you then we may be able to come up with suggestions.

Hi lain, I work in community pharmacy as a healthcare assistant, my main duty is dispensing,  preparing medications, unpacking stock, answering the phone and  lending a hand in the shop assisting patients as a brief description of my role. I find myself getting pulled from one task to another, the pharmacy as a whole is really loud and forever feels chaotic, under fluorescent lighting for 10 hours a day and constant pressure to dispense around 500 prescriptions in a day alongside other duties. I don’t know if I should just change my career as a whole and find something that suits me better. I feel like I’m stuck completely.

Lissy02 said:

I don’t know if I should just change my career as a whole and find something that suits me better.

I'm afraid I think you would benefit from a change.

The nature of your job does not have much scope for change to help your sensitivities other than perhaps the lighting - the constant tug and pull of all your tasks each day is a stressor that is really hard to live with.

I spend many decades in IT support at all levels and was always surrounded by the constant flow of problems, scheduled tasks and projects with the phones as an ever present background cacophony that could not be left alone - the calls had to be answered in a certain number of rings.

My solution was to learn a mix of mindfulness and meditation so I could carve out little bits of peace for a minute here and there and de-stress before launching back into the chaos. It never became any less of a stress but I was able to cope better with it.

This isn't an overnight learning thing though, it took me years to get it to work well.

Do you have an option to train up and move away from the battlefront situations you find yourself in?

Lissy02 said:

I don’t know if I should just change my career as a whole and find something that suits me better.

I'm afraid I think you would benefit from a change.

The nature of your job does not have much scope for change to help your sensitivities other than perhaps the lighting - the constant tug and pull of all your tasks each day is a stressor that is really hard to live with.

I spend many decades in IT support at all levels and was always surrounded by the constant flow of problems, scheduled tasks and projects with the phones as an ever present background cacophony that could not be left alone - the calls had to be answered in a certain number of rings.

My solution was to learn a mix of mindfulness and meditation so I could carve out little bits of peace for a minute here and there and de-stress before launching back into the chaos. It never became any less of a stress but I was able to cope better with it.

This isn't an overnight learning thing though, it took me years to get it to work well.

Do you have an option to train up and move away from the battlefront situations you find yourself in?