Teresa's story

Hello, my name is Teresa and I’m the clinical service manager in the eye treatment centre.

I am so proud of the team in the eye treatment centre; we continued working throughout COVID-19 to provide sight saving treatment for our patients.

Some of our team were deployed to the main hospital and other wards and to all keep in touch we formed a WhatsApp group which everyone joined. We all supported each other throughout lockdown.

When team members had to self-isolate there were numerous offers of help from the rest. We provided a foodbank for our patients. Our main aim throughout was to continue to provide essential care whilst keeping our staff and patients safe. We pulled together, and despite our trusty volunteers shielding at home, we managed to keep our service running as close to normal as possible in a safe and effective manner.

There have been numerous comments from the patients we have seen as to how safe they feel. We requested that all our patients wore masks long before the government made it mandatory and we were the pilot area to test patients’ temperatures on their arrival. As we are increasing our patient numbers it has sometimes been difficult to provide a member of the nursing team to do this so our admin and reception staff happily volunteered to be trained to do this to help out.

We have always had an excellent team spirit but this has increased over the past six months.