WORKING ALONGSIDE THIS VIRUS IS TOUGH Katie Costello is a Nursing Assistant in the Practical Care Team at St Catherine’s Hospice in Crawley. This Dying Matters Awareness Week, she wanted to share this open letter with you all.
Hi everybody, I hope you’re all keeping safe and well. My name’s Katie. I’m a Nursing Assistant at St Catherine’s Hospice working as part of the Community Team which means I provide care to terminally ill people and their family and friends across our community in the comfort of their own homes. Every year, my colleagues and I provide care and support to around 2,100 local people facing death and bereavement. Coronavirus has made our roles tough to say the least. Patients and their families often look to us for answers, but in these uncertain times we can’t always give the answers they need. We can’t tell anyone how long this is going to go on for, or how long people will have to be away from their families and friends, from their usual routines, and life as they usually know it.
Katie Costello
have a social call with one of our amazing volunteers. So even for those people we can’t see physically right now, we’re still very much in touch, and very much there for them.
That’s really, really hard.
But working alongside this virus is tough, there’s no other word for it. It’s challenging, and sometimes stressful, but the love that we have for the people we care for and for our job is what keeps us going.
We all love our jobs, and we’re all committed to continuing to do everything we possibly can for all those who need us. We’re still providing care to people in the comfort of their own homes and on our wards, and for our Living Well Centres, which we’ve temporarily had to close, we’re providing support virtually, offering exercise, music, meditation and wellbeing resources online. We’ve also set up a Telephone Buddy system for our patients and their carers, where they can sign up to
We’re used to every day being different at the hospice, and that’s much the same now - every day is challenging in its own way. It’s a constant moving ship, as it is everywhere, and it’s affecting every department. We’ve had to put movement zones in at the hospice, social distancing means we can’t 10
