It never felt like it was enough

My role throughout the majority of the COVID-19 pandemic was as the Health and Wellbeing Lead for the organisation This was a new role, created during the pandemic, reflecting the need to prioritise the health and wellbeing of every member of the workforce, whether they were delivering front line, hands on care in hospital and in the community, working tirelessly to ensure that the environment and equipment was safe for both patients and staff, were isolating or working from home – and everyone in between!

I have worked in and around staff health and wellbeing for most of my time at Gateshead (18 years!), but it had never felt as critical as it did during 2020 and beyond. It was clear very quickly that if our people were to provide the best care that they could to our patients, then the organisation needed to do whatever it could to provide care to our people.

Very early on we recognised that this event would have a massive psychological impact on our people So, that was our first priority – we put more psychological support in place than we’d ever seen before And yet, no one was accessing it! It soon became clear that we’d misjudged the situation.

In those frantic, early days, people didn’t have the emotional capacity to seek out psychological support; they came to work, did what they needed to do, went home (or to a hotel!), slept and came back the next day to do it all again. Psychological support would be needed later – what people needed now was practical support –space to eat; somewhere to decompress; food and drink which was easily accessible.

I worked alongside some amazing QEF colleagues more than I ever had – we provided solutions such as care boxes, outside seating, sanctuary rooms, retreat days and yet it was never quite enough. I felt a huge sense of guilt as I sat at home in my kitchen, my husband leaving every day to go up to the hospital to work in the Pathology lab. I had never worked harder in my life, yet it never felt like it was enough felt humble. I had seen my colleagues work in ways that they should never have had to I had seen them work in awful conditions. I had seen the genuine compassion, not just of people who were looking after patients, but people who were doing everything they could to help staff – even if it didn’t always feel like that out on the ground

MS Teams was a revelation – it felt like we were working in a sci-fi world at first! We all soon came to have a love-hate relationship with Teams…grateful that we had the technology to stay connected to people; frustrated at the inability to reach out and connect in person, especially when the frustrations and worries of friends and colleagues spilled out through their eyes We all wanted to do the best we could, but it never felt like it was enough.

One feeling which sat very uncomfortably with me, was my sense of gratefulness….I know that seems strange given the context we were working in But in terms of the work I was doing, for the first time ever we received robust funding for staff health and wellbeing, so we could move projects ahead quickly that otherwise would have taken months and years to progress! We had a health and wellbeing team in place who could support our army of Health and Wellbeing Ambassadors, who in turn were doing some fantastic work in supporting people out in the organisation This all felt like the silver lining of a very dark COVID cloud.

Someone said to me recently that they felt that they were abandoned during COVID, and that ‘the management’ didn’t care about them. I was a little bit heartbroken in that moment, after witnessing for myself everything that was trying to be done behind the scenes. I challenged that person, gently, because I could see that from their perspective, it felt like the truth

But I understand, that for some people, the situation was so intolerable that whatever we did would never be enough, and I am learning to accept that…

Overall, as we started to move into a world of living alongside COVID, I

Kerry Gowland OD Practitioner

(Previously HWB

Lead)

People and Organisational Development