Home care worker: I try to lift their spirits a wee bit but at times I feel like breaking down

Sam Rutherford, 31, has been working as a domiciliary carer since she was a teenager. The mother of one, who works for the South Eastern Health Trust, spoke to the News Letter about the stresses she and colleagues are facing due to the crisis.

But she also described how heartened she has been by a growing sense of recognition in wider society of the valuable contribution she and other frontline health workers are making.

“I would be going to see between 11 and 12 people in a day,” she told the News Letter.

“You’re there for a specific reason, to help them and support them. It’s a wide variety of reasons I’m there – mental health, dementia, old age, things like that. You’re there to support them with personal care, with meals, medication, that sort of thing.

“There is the odd day you find yourself running behind but you do catch your tail eventually. And there is not a single one that I don’t enjoy going in to see. They are great.

“And you could be the only person they’re seeing every day. I might be going in to some people and seeing them in the morning, and they might not see anyone else until I am back in again because no one has been coming to visit – especially now that family can’t visit.”

But, she said, many of the people she cares for are feeling “quite low” having been isolated from their families and worried by the grim news around the pandemic.

“The morale is low, right across all of them. You go in and they have the news on with all the doom and gloom, the deaths, everything.

“I have to try and lift their spirits a wee bit. We have a bit of banter and, as much as I’m worrying too about everything at the minute, that’s not what they need at the minute. They need me to come in and lift their mood and not be doom and gloom too. I do my best.”

The dedicated care worker admits to struggling with the pressures at times.

“For the first three weeks when the outbreak did start happening and things were getting worse, the news was on every day and I did start thinking to myself that this is really scary,” she said.

“I was thinking ‘I’m going to have to go out there and I’m leaving my family at home – what if I bring it back to my family?’.

“It’s all the ifs and buts. It’s the unknown. There are underlying conditions here too. I have asthma so we all have to be really careful. I’m trying to do my best as well, not going out unless I really have to, only going shopping when we really need it. It is hard.

“There are days when I come home and I just feel like breaking down. You’ve been that shoulder for everyone else all day. You’re trying to keep the morale up but inside you’re petrified yourself. You’re hearing about more and more care staff getting it.”

But she had been moved by the growing recognition of the value of the job she is doing each day, she said.

“I’ve noticed it more and more. It is very nice to know that people recognise that we’re not just out there doing a minimal job.”

She added: “We are hands on, in close contact and it’s an important job.”