This is how Boris described his roadmap for the lifting of
lockdown measures as he said spring
was on its way ‘both literally and figuratively’.
It's light at end of the tunnel, even if it feels like a long tunnel! There is a lot of understandable caution in the wind and it’s still probably going to be at least another six months before it feels that everything is back to normal.
It’s so hard to believe it’s been a year. No-one could have ever predicted this and I’m going to say again that I appreciate just how tough it’s been for you all, whatever your experience.
It’s been stressful and difficult for frontline staff who have faced daily anxiety about catching and spreading covid, whilst wearing uncomfortable face masks and PPE. It’s been challenging and isolating for staff working remotely, hunched over make-shift desks with sore backs, eye strain and zoom fatigue. Some of you have been trying to work while looking after your kids at home, have been terribly ill from the virus, had the immense pressure of having to shield or faced tragic loss and grief.
It’s been such a tough year and it’s a miracle that you have managed to keep going and make it through even if we are emerging somewhat knackered and emotionally drained.
It feels as if our whole lives have been on hold in this weird groundhog day world and that we’ve had a year of ‘standing still’ to some extent. But, your phenomenal work actually tells a very different story. The numbers are amazing and show that far from being stuck, you’ve managed to make great strides forwards with your undisputed determination and ingenuity taking on every obstacle.
Since the pandemic started you’ve cared and supported around 100,000 people; selflessly and compassionately providing the highest quality care to help others. You have saved and changed lives.
You’ve held 9000 remote consultations using Attend Anywhere with patients, equivalent to around 7000 hours. You’ve set up a 24-hour patient and carer helpline and been part of rolling out the largest vaccination programme in our history, administering thousands of vaccines to staff in just weeks. Our clinical support services have kept the wheels on the bus in so many ways, helping people who use our services, helping people to work remotely and supporting our programmes of change. And much, much more. I could not be more impressed or proud.
When we went into lockdown a year ago I talked about living in Eyam, the infamous ‘plague village’, in my blog. As a nightmare tale from history, Eyam's ordeal takes some surpassing and is a poignant story of sacrifice. When the great plague arrived in 1665, rather than flee this wild corner of Derbyshire - and risk spreading the infection - villagers locked themselves away to suffer in isolation. And suffer they did. For 14 months infection ravaged the village and 75% of the population lost their lives.
Pandemics are not new to the human species — they're just new to those of us alive now and who’d have thought a year ago the whole country would have to do what those brave villagers in Eyam did hundreds of years ago.
At the beginning of the pandemic last March, the BBC's Fergal Keane visited our village as we braced ourselves for the difficult times ahead. He interviewed 96 year old Sheila Vypan, who not only lives up the road from me, but whose grandson actually works for Pennine Care in our mental health services. He got in touch after last year’s blog to let me know his grandmother was a neighbour. Small world.
Anyway, BBC reporter Fergal Keane returned to our village this week to do a ‘year on’ follow-up piece and spoke to Sheila again to see how she was coping. He asked what her secret to staying happy was and Sheila replied, “Being in the present, trying not to think too much of what might be or what has been. But just taking it in, all that’s here now, and making the most of it”.
I just love this sentiment. Yes, the roadmap out of the pandemic means we can start thinking of the future and looking forward to things like holidays and we do need to think about what the roadmap means for us as an organisation and how things might change over the summer and autumn as we return to more normal life. But we still need to manage the present, take one day at a time and not worry about what we can’t currently change or control.
We will eventually get to the other end of the tunnel and to a better place, but in the meantime, if we can find ways of just taking each day at a time and valuing what we have now, then we might find it easier to get through.
And when we come out the other end, we won’t go back to exactly what we were doing before, for example, we will continue to support staff to work in a more agile way, both in work places and at home, so we can create extra space for other things, for example, in our Trust HQ building. What this agile working looks like will be down to what works for people who use our services and what works for individual staff, with no expectation that we will go back to working in exactly the same way we did previously. We need to be creative in finding new ‘blended’ ways of working that builds in the advantages we have had from remote working but with the undoubted benefits of seeing each other in person more often.
When the great plague was happening those many centuries ago, Sir Isaac Newton fled his cramped apartment in Cambridge where he was studying for the safety of his family home in Lincolnshire.
His family had a large garden with many fruit trees, and in those uncertain times, out of step with ordinary life, his mind roamed free of routines and social distractions. And it was in this context that a single apple falling from a tree struck him as more intriguing than any of the apples he had previously seen fall. Gravity was a gift of the plague!
You see, there is an
opening for previously unthinkable change, not only for the big societal and
organisational stuff, but also in countless small ways – privately, personally.
We have lived for months at close quarters with ourselves. We will have deepened our appreciation of some of the simple things we have missed, and some of the pleasures that have helped us through, even if it is only the taste of a new season apple. And in some measure, one year on, we surely know ourselves so much better.
Best wishes
Claire
You can follow me on Twitter @ClaireMolloy2
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