Most of us can only imagine what a day inside the NHS looks like. A million important tasks to be done and patients needing urgent care but for some this is a daily reality. Lauren Jolley is a 21-year-old health care assistant and her job is to support the nurses on her ward. Her job is all about personal care. She says: ‘everything you do in your normal day from the minute you get up to the second you go to sleep. From getting up and brushing your teeth, feeding and going to bed, I do all those things.’ But her usual routine drastically changed when Covid-19 began to spread in the UK.
Covid-19 shook the whole world and forced many countries into lockdown. Shops closed, restaurants closed, gym closed and most of things you can think of closed. But one thing remains: the NHS. The entire UK rediscovered its appreciation for the NHS and everyone that works there. In the middle of the chaos the public rely are left to rely on key workers. Many around the UK stepped outside their homes to applaud those leaving for their shift.
The NHS are facing a situation nobody expected. With employees working long shifts with not enough equipment, those at the front lines tackling Covid-19 feel underprepared. All over the world there is a shortage of protective wear and masks, some companies are even profiting off this crisis by upping their prices for protective wear. The lack of protection is extremely dangerous for those working hands on with the virus. Lauren says: ‘there isn’t enough PPE to go around at the moment and that’s scary.’
With all eyes turning to the NHS it’s all over social media and news platforms, with heart-breaking stories and accounts of breakthrough everyone wants to speculate what’s going on in the medical world. But could all the attention from the media be a negative thing? Not everyone appreciates the new input from all angles. Lauren says: ‘the media are making out that we’re in some kind of death zone in the hospital and we’re not.’ On the flip side, ‘people keep saying you’re a hero if you go in, I felt a lot of pressure on my shoulders.’
All of us have needed the national health service and probably at one point found ourselves there trusting the hands of the doctors and nurses who work there. But what is it like to work there in the middle of a global pandemic? She says: ‘I’m not scared of coronavirus at all… it’s just a respiratory tract infection, but I am terrified of what it can do to other people, but for myself I’m not scared of it.’
Working on a ward with extremely vulnerable people can be challenging enough but during a pandemic there could be huge consequences if the virus spread around the ward. Lauren says: ‘when I was on ward and we got told that someone we’ve been looking after all morning had tested positive for coronavirus, that was so scary.’ Hospitals are having to do everything they can to stop the virus spreading between patients and wards which means everyone must do what they can to contain the virus, especially if someone on your ward has tested positive. She says: ‘With everything that’s going on you don’t want to be near other people from other ward because you’re worried of it spreading quickly between wards.’ The extremity of the situation has undoubtedly changed the atmosphere inside the hospital. She adds: ‘when I was going to get things from other parts of the hospital it felt very eerie.’
After patients had tested positive for Covid-19 on her ward Lauren and some of her other colleagues were sent home for a period of time in isolation while they got tested before they could come back to work. Thankfully Lauren’s came back negative. She said: ‘Now that I’ve been, had the swab, came back negative I’m quite ready to get back to work…I’m excited to get back and do my part, I feel like I’m wasted sat at home.’
The staff at the NHS give a part of themselves every time they go to work, and it goes way beyond checking off s to-do list of daily tasks. Lauren says: ‘if I see someone that’s normally quite chatty being not chatty then I need to make sure I’ve gone out of my way to do something to take them a cup of tea without even asking them just because we know how they take their tea and coffee…it’s just little things.’
If we can hope for positive change to come after the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s that people will have found a new admiration for those who work for the NHS and the institution itself. Not everyone around the world has access to free healthcare like we have the privilege of in the UK.
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