HOPE MATHUMBU

(She/her)
Nursing student and health worker

14 September 2020
Wurundjeri, Woi Wurrung Country

My name is Hope. I am a queer South African woman who’s been living in Melbourne since 2003. I have a Masters in Public Health and am currently completing a nursing degree. [I spent 2020] as a mature age student trying to get through a nursing degree. I wasn’t eligible for Centrelink or other supports, I don’t live at home with my family, and essentially, to get a nursing degree, you need to do 800 hours of unpaid work, which was difficult because there were a lot of unanswered questions about what would happen to students if we contracted COVID. And all the question marks around COVID were not answered by the university or other people.

[I’ve] worked in hotel quarantine, in pop-up [COVID] testing, drive-through testing, until the government put [out] a mandate that students couldn’t do certain types of work two weeks prior to starting an unpaid placement. Recently I’ve been doing a lot of palliative care work [and] that job has been really good. It’s a very interesting thing because [nursing] is a female-led profession. [There’s] been a lot of talk about being on the front lines [and] whether they want to honour us next year, but they’re not going to pay us. I’m really disappointed in the professions – [there is a] lack of caring [about what] happens [to] the workers. I think that burnout is a real thing for the health care workforce.

One of the saving graces, I guess, is that I was out every day. I would see people three, four times a week. [But] sometimes I’d feel very sad that I was out, seeing all these people [when they couldn’t see their own families]. We didn’t really have a lot of conversations about quality of life, particularly with elderly people. We were trying to prolong someone’s life, maybe one or two more years, and all they ever wanted was to see their grandkids or their children. Lots of anniversaries, lots of birthdays that people missed without a choice.

I hope that in the future [we can] get more people involved in health care, in taking charge of their health, and that we can kick aside some of this hierarchy that comes with health. I hope we can pop that bubble on what it means to be privileged, on what it means to look after each other, and that people’s health can [be put] back into [their own] hands. I hope we can share those messages, and [we can be in charge of that] as a community.

I am really looking forward to camping and challenging myself. I’ve always resisted elements of camping – I’m more glamping adjacent, I would say. [In the past I would] never have been convinced to do this, but we’re going ahead, baby. And I’m looking forward to just getting out of here and reconnecting with nature.