COVID-19 REFLECTIONS

摘要

A community nursery nurse in England who retired and returned during the pandemic, and a health visitor in Scotland, reveal their recent experiences. I've worked as a nursery nurse in the health service for 38 years, with a couple of breaks. For the last quarter of a century I have worked in community nursery nursing, health visiting and more recently school nursing too. Six months ago I decided to take my pension, have a month's break and come back on far fewer hours. Little could I have imagined how much things would change. Every day I saw WhatsApp messages showing how fast the pace of change was in the NHS. The past 10 years had been very stressful and this was my refresh and regroup period. I knew I could face it all... when I went back. Six months on and how has my way of practising changed? It's completely different. I'm doing behaviour visits and other contacts with parents and carers over the phone. I've always understood that only 7% of communication comes from the words we use. The rest is made up from intonation, body language and other non-verbal cues - that's harder now.