Senior staff are acutely aware of the "cumulative fatigue" of workers on the wards particularly since COVID's Omicron variant peaked throughout January leaving BHS well over 100 staff short each day with managers scrambling to fill vacant shifts.

While hopeful the peak has passed, and with the number of staff isolating now averaging 30 to 50 a day, there are concerns that numbers could again creep up over the coming weeks with COVID transmission at schools impacting staff availability.

Ballarat Health Services executive director of people and culture Claire Woods said while the pressure had eased on staff furloughs, "that's still a lot of shifts a day, a lot of people" to cover.

Many staff had volunteered to work overtime at the end of their shifts to cover at least part of the next shift left understaffed.

"My anecdotal information is that when people are finished their shift and see what staffing looks like for the next shift, there are people saying I will stay and work a half shift or double shift to support colleagues," she said.

"As an organisation we don't want people working double shifts but what the person the ground is saying is that's all well and good but when they see what colleagues on the next shift have to do they're staying because of who they are as a professional. It's a conundrum that's not sustainable."

And she said many staff were struggling to balance extra hours at work with the need for time for themselves and their families.

"The whole way through (Code Brown) we have not directed or called people back from leave, but I have heard quite a few stories of people saying they were going to take two weeks leave but only took a week, or they were going to take leave but decided not to.

"There's a fatigue level, and an emotional toll, on people who are perhaps not being asked to come to work but the are, knowing the area in which they work is short staffed, saying I wasn't supposed to work but I will come in.

"Knowing the pressure on their colleagues, I think people are really struggling to find the balance of 'I need time for myself versus I feel I need to go to work' because they know how many staff are not able to come to work because of furloughs and isolation."

Ms Woods said COVID had impacted staff in most wards and departments across the health service equally, with no one area worse hit.

Mostly there were one, two or three staff from any one department or ward impacted at a time, through transmission at home or in the community rather than the workplace.

"We looked to redeploy staff on a shift by shift basis. People say with no elective surgery there must have been availability of staff but the (operating) theatre has still been busy with emergency surgery so there's just been shift by shift redeployment as vacancies come up."

Ms Woods said staff from the BHS dental service had been redeployed to the most number of different areas across the health service, though most could not work on direct care they could do other jobs to free nurses up.

In addition, the start of the medical year means there will be new graduates and trainees joining the BHS workforce.

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"Having the medical year starting with new graduates on board and the trainee program up and running, that's not going to be able to replace skilled staff but it helps having more people in the organisation. And we really hope that, just by way of the schools RAT program, people staying safe and keeping restrictions as they are, that we identify positive cases before they come in the door and are able to cover our workforce," she said.

Because of the ongoing uncertainty and pressure, Ms Woods said the first six months of this year would see a priority on finding well-being interventions that were meaningful for staff.

"We're not going to solve the problem but we need to understand where people are and support them," she said.

"We can't say to people 'take three weeks off' and we can't just say to people here is a movie voucher, food hamper or meal voucher as a lot of those things are seen as tokenistic and not meaningful, but how do we as an organisation do things to acknowledge the sacrifice they are making."

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