The Care Home that I work in got a COVID outbreak in September which put us on what has to be the worst rota that I think I have ever worked. 1 day on, 2 days off. This when you first hear it sounds wonderful, ‘ah two days off to catch up on everything that you need to do and only 1 days of work, dream’. In reality the two days off were never two actual full days off. You’d have meetings to attend, or a course to do, there was always cover needed or simply you had done the sleep in at work and therefore you woke up at work on your ‘day off’, usually to the sound of blaring alarms and all hell breaking loose in the house. Never pleasant. 4 of the young people in the home ended up needing to self isolate and trying to get 4 kids with varying levels of need to isolate in their bedrooms for what was 10 days at the time was not an easy proposition.
While we had 4 isolating, we still had another 3 that needing looking after and entertaining and with restrictions at the time meaning that they weren’t able to attend anything off site, life became all in all a little tricky. As the outbreak started in our home, there were a number of adults who also ended up needing to isolate due to positive tests, so a higher work rate and a dwindling staff team lead to some incredible pressures being put on those that remained. For me personally in this time, my partner (Jordan), moved over to the home that I work in. There were two main reasons for this, the first being that with a dwindling staff we desperately needed numbers and the second being that because Jordan and I live together, we were one of the weak links in the chain for the other house in the company becoming infected.
And so began what started off with ‘maximum a month’ and ended up with three months of Jordan working with me. Positives and Negatives with this which I will explore in a bit once I tell you the other big news that has come out since June. So that was COVID in September, not fun, but none the less we got through and we all came out the other side just about.