LEONA Smith thinks 2020 is a year she will never forget, a sentiment that is probably echoed by most of us.
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COVID-19 has touched everyone in some way, but especially so for those working on the frontline in health services across Australia.
As the manager of the subacute ward at Echuca Regional Health, Ms Smith oversees geriatric evaluation management, rehabilitation and inpatient palliative care.
“It’s been tricky this year, I’ve never experienced a pandemic before and it’s had its challenging moments,” she said.
“I won’t forget it.”
The subacute ward made changes to reduce the risks of spreading the virus to patients, which included limiting visits from loved ones.
“That’s probably one of things I’ll remember the most,” Ms Smith said.
“This was the year we weren’t able to involve the families with patient care.”
The ward had to reduce the number of people in different areas providing therapy, which meant timetabling differently, and smaller things like moving tables around in the dining room to accommodate social distancing.
“We would usually have big case conferences with lots of family members, but we haven’t been able to do that this year,” Ms Smith said.
“I think it’s been hard on all my colleagues and we’ve felt we’ve struggled to provide the excellence of care we usually do.”
Despite the challenges, Ms Smith said she was extremely proud of her team.
“All the staff have done an amazing job to provide the care we have, it’s just that little bit extra with wanting to have families involved, which has been tricky.
“We’ve tried to work around that by phone calls and FaceTime, but I think face-to-face is so much nicer.”
As if handling those changes wasn’t enough, COVID-19 added another job to Ms Smith's long to-do list: co-ordinating the visitor liaison role.
In late March, as the pandemic first took hold in Australia, Victorian Health Minister Jenny Mikakos announced new statewide restrictions on patient visitation at public and private hospitals.
Visits to a patient were limited to two hours at a time and each patient could have no more than two visitors per day.
“We need to keep strictly to these restrictions around the number of visitors so we can keep vulnerable patients in our hospitals safe, as well as those visitors,” Ms Mikakos said at the time.
ERH created the visitor liaison role to greet visitors at a small desk in the foyer and screen them before they entered the hospital.
This included asking those now all too familiar questions: Do you have any COVID-19 symptoms? Are you a close contact of someone with COVID-19? Have you travelled overseas recently?
“Initially we put a call out to all ERH staff to see if anyone was interested in helping with that role and we had a great response,” Ms Smith said.
“We had staff coming from all across the hospital, from admin, pharmacy, dental, nursing — just completely across the board, which was fantastic.
“It was extremely challenging to pull staff from all those different areas, so eventually we advertised to fill those positions because it went on for a long time,” she said.
Aside from screening patient visitors, the liaison person also deals with deliveries and tradespeople.
“We still had to run a hospital and fix things that broke down too,” Ms Smith said.
“They’re just a great bunch of people in clearly a very challenging job at times because we have had to reduce the amount of visitors coming into the hospital.”
The nature of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia has been changing constantly, particularly in Victoria which seemingly beat the virus before it took hold again.
“It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster and it’s a changing environment every single day,” Ms Smith said.
Despite the changes to advice and it being a distressing time for some people who didn’t have the access they usually would to loved ones in a hospital, Ms Smith said the public was mostly very understanding.
This also translated to the families of the patients in her ward.
“They were unable to move around too much, they had to stay in the patient’s room and still trying to maintain social distancing as well.
“There are a lot of things that have really challenged us as humans; it’s just not in our nature to have that social distancing with family members and loved ones,” she said.
Ms Smith said palliative care was another challenging component in dealing with visitors.
“We’ve been lucky enough in our hospital to still provide those patients who are dying with their family members, but just in a smaller groups.
“I don’t know how I would feel if I was working in one of the metropolitan hospitals or the aged care facilities where they weren’t allowed any visitors at all, that would be really tough.”
Out of Ms Smith's experience through the pandemic at ERH, the one thing that stood out was the support staff gave to each other.
“In the early stages of creating the role, if we didn’t have anybody to roster on, people I wouldn’t have expected put their hands up to help or offer assistance from all departments,” she said.
“I really felt that people supported the process, and while it was pretty stressful at times we always had someone to fall back on.”
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