Submitted by Tina
Private and Overseas Manager
In the first wave of the pandemic, I was asked to go and support the Princess Royal Hospital (PRH) in the Incident Room to help with any queries or worries that staff, public and patients may have. This included calling patients about cancelling appointments or procedure and completing any information about the patients onto the systems.
I also helped create Covid-safe office areas, by moving desks and furniture across the site to be two metres apart. Staff were very grateful that the time had been taken to come and assess, review and address their issues.
Also we had a lot of donations from the public that needed to be taken to areas of use to staff at work or at home – the list of donation’s is too long to add – and we are still receiving some today! The public and community have been amazing in helping us with anything we needed like scrubs and scrub bags.
We were given rooms to use by members of the public for staff to use who wanted to protect their family if they were working on infected areas. So by having a temporary accommodation for them to stay was amazing.
We were given a two bedroom flat (which we made into a three bedroom) free of charge with no furniture.
Within 24 hours after putting a shout out on social media, we had the flat kitted out with everything even down to tea, coffee, milk, bread, butter and tinned food for our staff to use. The community really did step up and the feeling was great! We have many pictures of staff receiving gifts like food parcels of hot food in general.
I was also asked to help set up the Covid testing hub at PRH. And when lateral flow tests came out in November 2021, I was asked to be a contact at PRH to help deliver them to staff members.
During the third wave, I was involved in helping allocating patients to go out to the independent sector (IS). It was great to see how the IS worked, and how we worked together.
This was a team effort and I am very proud of working in PRH. All the staff are very accommodating and helpful in all that was achieved and is still being achieving.
On reflection of this, it’s clear that we are able to work very closely and efficiently and in all areas together to get results.