VALERIE

(She/her)
Health care worker

15 November 2020
Boon Wurrung Country

My name is Valerie and I have recently left family violence. I work in health [care]. I have two teenage daughters and life has been interestingly challenging for the last probably 18 months. I think COVID has been interesting for me in terms of having come from a family violence background. Isolation was something that I really struggled with.
I also struggled with losing the connection to family violence services because they closed. I think that had a significant impact on my mental health. There was no face-to-face support. I really struggled in that space because I was already isolated from my family, my whole network of friends. Even at work, I have a team that support me in this space, but they were now working from home, so there was just me at work. I kind of felt that I [had] lost everything – literally. I could feel it slipping away as the pandemic went on longer and longer.

I work in health [care], so we were the front line of the pandemic. There were so many changes and so much pressure in such a short time. We could change a policy at 11 o’clock in the morning, and
at 1 o’clock I’d get a phone call to say, well, that’s changed [again]. I think the initial fear of not knowing and understanding the virus and the ability for it to spread in our environment was confronting for our team. I look after support services, and in the past, we’ve probably been at the bottom end of the health sector because we’re the cleaners, the environmental services, the PSAs [Patient Service Attendants] the laundry, the linen, the waste etc. And I think that [the pandemic] has highlighted just how important we are in that system, just how important our infection control is. So, it’s elevated us in the health sector. Rather than [it] being [just] doctors and nurses, now we’re all health care workers. And I think that’s being talked about in the media quite a lot – health care workers rather than the cleaners, the doctors and nurses – because at the end of the day, it’s united us as one cohesive team.

I think that COVID has actually given us [the] opportunity to take [a] step back and appreciate the little things, like taking that time or saying thank you. Every interaction becomes almost vital. It’s almost like your sense of connection to life in the world. While that [has] always existed, I don’t think we appreciated it. I think that the whole hospital team became that family for the patients at that time, and we did it well together as opposed to
‘us vs them’. I think everybody played their own individual role.

We’re there at the front line, we the strong people, we hold it together, we do all that stuff. I think it’s made everybody human [and] brought that whole human connection back, which is really important. We forget because we’re caught up in our own lives, our own dailyness, that we’re all human and we all need or want something. I think that’s probably the biggest message.