Jonathan's story

Hello my name is Jonathan. I'm an associate practitioner and I’ve worked in the labs at West Suffolk Hospital for over 15 years.

My mum, dad and wife all work at the hospital too it’s a real family affair. I’m a bit of a jack of all trades down at the labs and process all kinds of patient samples. Although we're not a patient-facing team, over 80% of medical diagnoses happen down here.

We’ve obviously been processing the thousands of samples that have come in from COVID-19 tests in the past few months so it’s been tough and more of us have picked up night shifts to ensure a fast turnaround on test results. With new guidance, research and legislation coming in every other day, we’ve had to be flexible at work; when the announcement came that all healthcare workers can request antibody tests, we knew we were going to have to deal with huge numbers of samples in the coming weeks.

My wife and I have also had to be flexible in the sense that we struggled to get childcare at the height of lockdown. We had to work around each other to ensure our son was looked after at all times.

It’s been a challenging, but exhilarating six months. We’ve really pulled together as a pathology team; the teamwork I’ve seen has been unending!