Bearing witness to a pandemic BUPA | SANITAS
I am so lucky to work for this company! We had so many people supporting us. All you had to do was pick up the phone and say: I need masks, more beds, people to look after the children, and our people would come to work willingly.
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We had to abandon our customary personal touch with patients. Where we knew the person wasn’t going to recover and was going to die soon, we would call the family in to say goodbye, but it was all very cold. We only let them have twenty minutes, and didn’t let them get too close. But we tried to make up for that with the miracle of technology. We used everything constantly: phones and tablets that the company provided. A lot of farewells were said that way and you felt like you were invading what ought to have been a very private time. I remember the good moments, of which there were many. We watched lots of patients recover, people who went out stronger and who helped us keep going ourselves. My family were hugely supportive. I am married, with three children aged 17, 15 and 13 years old. My husband is asthmatic and I was really afraid of passing it to him. I can’t thank him enough for how easy he made it all for me. The first weeks, he worked from home, which helped me be able to be very flexible, and he didn’t let me lift a finger at home. I would open my front door and go straight to my room. The next day, I would have a shower and go back. That was my family relationships for the first two or three weeks - non-existent, basically. My husband would say: Forget the house - I will deal with that, you deal with the hospital. That helped me to be with my team, who were very overworked. I tried to lighten their load and doing analyses and dealing with the deceased so that they didn’t have to deal with the corpse of someone they had got close to. We were more afraid of the future than the present. There were times when we couldn’t see any light at the end of the tunnel, but after four weeks of lockdown in Spain we started to see a small shaft of light. Where there had been 100 Covid patients waiting to be admitted, it was down to twenty. I think Covid gave me back the chance to be on the front line with my patients. Before that, I sometimes wondered why I had studied nursing if I was going to end up in administration. I should have studied business administration, as all I did was project planning, human relations, but no nursing. But after all we have been through I can only say: How lucky I am to have studied nursing! The most difficult part is behind us and is actually the most gratifying part of my ten years as nursing director. It is really special when your staff tell you that they have felt supported and that they knew they were not alone in the crisis. �
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