Working in care should be completely led by the needs and choices of the person that you are supporting; in a crisis where an individual’s ability to move freely, and to do the things that usually bring them comfort and joy, is restricted, I’ve found that many of the people I work with feel as though they are not being supported in the choices that they want to make.
It was so difficult to explain to someone what was happening in the world, whilst also trying to protect their emotional health. Even if some people weren’t quite grasping exactly what was going on, their fear and uncertainty was painfully obvious and reflected in the extra emotional work we were, and still are, having to put in. Not only are we still trying to provide the best quality of emotional and physical care for our residents, but we’re filling out twice the amount of paperwork, doing a nurse’s job and sending both weekly and daily observations to local doctors, constantly recording our own temperatures and the temperatures of everybody in the home. It’s been a lot of extra work to take on but eventually we got in the swing of it.
On the other hand, the sense of community within the home and between myself and my colleagues has greatly improved. Everyone is forced to be in the same vicinity as each other and our relationships have definitely grown stronger. We’ve had to be more creative in terms of activities and how we plan our days, we even had our own ‘music festival’ with contributions from both talented residents and members of staff!
Throughout though, we’ve not felt supported by the government. I know that our local council have been working tirelessly to try and contact care homes, create new resources specifically surrounding the coronavirus crisis for training purposes, and to provide support. But years of underfunding, government cuts, and lack of social care staff in local government has done too much damage for them to be efficiently supportive and informative now. Not at all the fault of the local social services, but a reflection of our government’s attitude to apparent ‘low-skilled’ care workers that has been around for the past decade. Whilst well-meaning, the whole ‘clap for carers’ thing felt like a massive kick in the teeth to a lot of us because of this. I can’t even imagine how some NHS staff must have felt. In terms of the actual government, the support felt little-to-none.
I specifically remember the day that the government decided that staff in care homes had to wear surgical masks at all times. I remember this specifically, because no prior warning had been given to care homes, or at least to us, before this. It was about 5pm in the middle of the week, and one colleague ran out of the office with our one box of masks in one hand, the phone in the other, and started handing them out to us all just telling us to put them on. That was funnily enough the only time I really felt quite scared at work because I didn’t feel that we had been at all supported or prepared for that at all.
It’s disgusting that Boris Johnson has placed some of the blame for high mortality rates in care homes on the homes themselves, saying some ‘didn’t really follow the procedures’. [While the PM didn't apologise at PMQs, he said, 'The last thing I wanted to do was blame care workers for what has happened or for any of them to think I was blaming.']
I think the lack of communication speaks for itself, everyone has been trying their absolute best. I say this as someone who is actually involved in local party politics, but the majority of people who make those decisions have no idea what it’s like to try and adapt to a whole plethora of new regulations whilst trying to maintain a sense of normalcy for some really vulnerable people.
Whether he intended to or not, in desperately trying to search for a scapegoat for our government’s own failings (the statistics don’t lie), he definitely did pin blame on care home workers.
I think that even some people that I work with think that the homes that have had Covid-19 outbreaks may have been down to staff laziness, I genuinely believe that it is 100% down to bad luck. We’ve had people in and out of hospital, we’ve had staff that have been caught out not following lockdown properly. The fact that we’ve been safe is just lucky, when care homes less than a mile away, following the exact same guidelines have lost lives. There are things you can do to prevent outbreaks, but they’re not failsafe and there’s so much guilt and shame surrounding homes where outbreaks have occurred, and there just shouldn’t be.
There’s already so much pressure and a massive emotional strain on all of us working in care, his comments were devastating and degrading to a whole lot of people and completely unfounded. If Boris Johnson really thinks that the things he said were true, then by default is he saying this his own Covid-19 infection was his own fault?