Sick leave and overtime exceeding two million hours.

The alarms from the care have replaced each other during the year.

When the second wave hit, it was an already strained work force that had to take the beating.

70 percent resigned

Perhaps the hardest hit are the country's infection and emergency departments.

Now there are alarms that healthcare staff are resigning as a result of the tough work environment.

An example is the infection ward at Danderyd Hospital.

Here, 34 out of 50 nurses have left since January.

- In the spring, we thought: we will solve this and line up.

Now it's different.

The staff can not cope with a second wave, says Josefine Lundqvist, nurse and specialist representative for the Healthcare Association.

320 years of experience replaced by five years

She says that the colleagues who left had a common experience of 320 years.

Among new employees, it is significantly lower: a total of five years.

- Those who are new are super talented and are always there for the patient.

But it is not possible to close one's eyes to the fact that such a loss of experience affects the business.

"Wondering if it's worth it"

The story is repeated in several places in the country, shows SVT's tour.

In the Stockholm Region, just over 3,600 have resigned since March, almost 900 more than last year.

At Linköping University Hospital, staff have been lost in the emergency room - several of them during the second wave of the pandemic.

To cope with the situation, temporary staff has been brought in.

Christmas holidays have only been granted in isolated cases.

- Many people love this job, but the way you are treated by the employer makes you wonder if it is worth it.

That is why we are seeing these redundancies.

You do not have the same energy and the same loyalty as in the spring, says Emma Klingvall, department chair of the Healthcare Association in Östergötland.

"Continues without interruption"

According to the hospital management at Danderyd Hospital, operations have not "continued without disruption" despite this year's redundancies, partly because new staff are being trained before they are put to work.

- In this way, the hospital's routines and high level of patient safety are maintained, the hospital's press manager Bernd Schmitz writes in an email to SVT.

Region Östergötland can not comment on the recent dismissals at the medical emergency department in Linköping, but believes that it has a relatively high turnover of staff there as well usually.