What has been challenging for you, during the pandemic?
So, way back, when we first went into lockdown there was a little bit of friction within the team, as in team leaders and service managers with slightly different views as to how much the staff should be working from home, and when they can work from home, accepting that we are a face to face service of school nurses, health visitors, etc. However, there were many things that could be done from home. We did resolve that quite quickly. But it was clear that there were very different views between us, and as time has gone on, what has become more apparent is that those views seem to be linked with how well those people work from home themselves, or how sociable they are. How much they need people around them day to day to do to do the job. So those that really miss it are the ones that are arguing for staff, to be back in the office, etc. As per the government directive, we stopped face to face visits for a few weeks. And that was really hard supporting that and the staff through that because it felt very wrong to them at that time. We didn’t have access to PPE, but staff were saying they would rather take the risk. We got us set up on Microsoft Teams and that’s what we used as an alternative for putting eyes on people, but absolutely not the same as face to face contact.
I’m a very tactile person. I know the staff that are comfortable with accepting the hug and I will readily give hugs. It’s It’s my default setting when, there’s nothing I can say, or do to change a situation immediately. Now that time has gone, I have found that harder and harder. And this last week has been particularly difficult. I think people are just reaching the limits of what they have endured through this. So for a lot of the staff, home working has been great. We’ve got staff, trying to work while home-schooling their children and we’re accommodating them. That balance of being at home and going out to work, and all that but trying to do a job alongside home-schooling your children, maintaining confidentiality, not letting your children hear what you’re talking about. As well as all of those pressures are really difficult. The same as the whole country. Some people’s partners have been furloughed. Some have lost their jobs.
That sense of powerlessness. I can’t make the situation better for them. And I fight every day with the fact that my default position is to try and be a fixer. And I think I’m guessing I think I’m getting better, but I certainly aren’t there yet. And there’ll be something going through my mind, like… “what about if you did that or what suggest this…” and I have to stop myself all the time. I started saying “I’m an open book” to my team. I say to them if I appear to be stuttering and incoherent it’s either my menopausal brain or it’s because I’m trying to stop myself from saying something. Because I might be trying to fix, and I can’t fix and nor is it my right for me to fix. I think that was probably one of your sessions that really, really brought that to the front of my mind. I think that as a service, it has been particularly difficult a lot of staff have, really struggled and I have been trying to be there for them. I can’t change the workload and it is crazy. We are X number of hours down within the team, and we just have to just pick up that work and cover the work?
I don’t expect you to be able to do that as much as I want to. I care about my job, I care about the families, my work with the school nurses, I care about the people I’m working with. I try to create psychological safety within the team. I’m very self-critical and the rating myself but that’s me, and that’s my issue. When I make a mistake, I say to them none of us are perfect, we’re all fallible. And I want you to feel able to say to me, when you think something, either or when you know something’s gone wrong, when you’ve done something wrong, or when you think it might have and, and we’ll learn from it, and we’ll fix it. But we have, as in any team, there’s a range of staff, some who are real perfectionists. And, and I can see the conversation and it just feels so much harder having a team meeting, over Microsoft teams. Sometimes somebody says something, and I think, Oh, here we go, that there’s going to be there really defensive response coming soon, because of the perception of perfection, and there’s a perception of incompetence, and neither, are true, and whilst that, that’s obviously not an issue that is at all related to COVID, that is just something about team dynamics. It is just, it just feels so much more challenging to work with.
It, isn’t it and that just sounds exhausting being the compassionate leader in this environment.
I think that’s it. I’m very much a sponge, so I soak up the emotions of people around me, I can feel okay, inside. But if I’m working with a team that are really anxious about something, that is how I will end up and up feeling when actually I didn’t start out feeling worried about it. So, we could keep working through this, absorbing the feelings of the staff is exhausting. But I think that’s probably one reason why it’s becoming harder and harder for the staff is that every client, they go and visit, because they aren’t seeing many people. That’s what the health visitors are experiencing and offloading of all the feelings of either new mums or mums with toddlers. Yeah, and, and it is quite exhausting.
On a personal level, I’m a very solitary person, I’m very happy with my own company, working from home and has not been a problem at all. I haven’t struggle with lack of face-to-face contact or beyond that physical element that I mentioned earlier. And the way I looked at it is well, to get two hours more out of me, because I’m not spending that time travelling an hour to get to work and an hour to get home again. And I don’t have to do that. And that’s blissful. Because I don’t particularly like the travel time. I could never frame it in a way as well. I can plan my day, or I can wind down from that day. I was thinking, oh, gosh, I got to get home and start cooking the tea. You know?
I’m missing my daughter like crazy because she lives elsewhere. She’s just married. She’s doing okay, but I miss her.
I think another thing that was challenging for me quite early on was I felt a lot of guilt. We were asked to volunteer for the nightingale hospital at Harrogate. And, and I just didn’t want to. It had been 12 years since I was on a Ward and more much longer than that, since I was anywhere near a ventilator, didn’t want to leave what bit of my family I could have contact with at the time. Although I am an extremely stubborn person internally, I can very easily be guilt tripped. And, and I very much saw my responsibility as being there for the team. But I don’t know whether that was an excuse or not. I just didn’t want to go, and I can’t dress it up any other way. That did come with some level of guilt. So, when I could be involved more recently in our vaccine centre, then that felt like something more useful. I suppose I was looking at it in a practical sense. But people say, oh, gosh, this is making history. And I don’t know why, but I didn’t quite look at it like that. But I can see what see what they mean.
You know, in lots and lots of the properties that we visit, there’s no two-metre social distance, and people don’t have that sort of luxury of space. People are not always honest with you when you ask if anybody has got any symptoms? Then the Health Visitor arrives to do a visit to be told that somebody had gone for a swab. So, they hadn’t answered the questions, honestly, because obviously, somebody did have symptoms.
In the early weeks when the government said no, no face-to-face community visits. That was when the staff were fearful as they were unable to see their patients face to face. So, they understandably view themselves as responsible, and they can’t, they can’t go in and see them and assess in in the way that they would normally. They felt a huge sense of responsibility. GPs weren’t seeing anyone face to face, the situation with midwifery services was slightly different. So then the staff were getting requests for midwifery services to go and do more and more visits. And so it almost felt like it probably wasn’t because it’s very often just how things get communicated or twisted, as that comes down the communication path is it felt like midwives not doing one thing became another surfaces responsibility in a completely different trust. And then GPs when seeing patients face to face there weren’t doing six week checks on babies. And so that felt like it became the health visitors responsibility. I don’t really think that that affected me significantly. So I was trying to support them just trying to think back how I would be doing it and and I think it would be acknowledging that their concerns that they felt responsible, but that it was either a national decision to do things that way and and an organisational decision so therefore, they they couldn’t be held responsible but it’s still that responsibility.
What could you possibly see as being helpful?
I guess, the way the organisation moved forward with technology, I think it’s given those more options as a service moving forward. And I think, there’s no sense of rushing, or pulling people back into bases and offices. So I would, I guess, my concern there, I’m gonna go off at a tangent, sorry, my concern that is, is for those staff that do need that. That time in the office to run things past a colleague, all of which is achievable. Everybody has mobile phones. Everybody has a laptop can all call somebody or they have a whatsapp group for checking in and checking out because of learn working. And I think it’s probably been good to demonstrate that for some people who are homeworking can work. And so for me, that hasn’t had a problem with that. I will, I would say that as long as I meet the needs of the service and the staff, so anybody moving forward that wants to see me face to face. I accommodate that, I think, I think the challenges have led to us being more innovative, which is probably been a good a good thing with hindsight.
Working from home has been very helpful for the reasons that I described before. For me, I still feel it’s given me a better work life balance. But I don’t I don’t see that for the staff. Because what I see for them is that actually, rather than in the travel in time, the logging on earlier I was talking about at a team meeting the other day, and I said, I’ve been trying to work out for months why communicating on zoom or teams is so exhausting. And I said, I don’t know whether it’s right or wrong. But I’ve come to realise that unless it’s a meeting I’m leading on, I’m probably very often not always present completely in that meeting, and probably trying to do something else at the same time. So if I was at a meeting in work face to face, I wouldn’t have my laptop out working, because I would think I was being rude. But actually, that’s very often what I’m what I’m doing now. And that is probably what a lot of staff are doing as well, when you look at where their eyes are. And you know, I don’t either. I’ve found that difficult. I’m not sure what else to find helpful.
I’m meeting my own needs and I hope the nurses as well. But you know, I’ve worked with the same team for three years now. That’s not to say always get everything right, because I don’t. But you just learn to read people and know when something’s right.