By Heather Norris Nicholson
Over 400 student healthcare workers at the University of Huddersfield are being deployed around the region to help different NHS trusts during the Coronavirus Crisis.
These second and third-year students come from over 40 courses offered by the Department of Nursing and Midwifery. They already have valuable practical experience from having worked on placements in hospitals, nursing homes, and in community settings as part of their studies. A number of their healthcare tutors with professional and clinical backgrounds are helping too.
This is an invaluable transfer of expertise at a time of great urgency. Offering people seemed an obvious course of action as the university had already donated to Huddersfield Royal Infirmary from its own cache of gloves, masks, and other supplies intended for use in teaching on healthcare courses.
Nationally, a pool of about 18000 students with relevant professional practice, in agreement with the government and other regulatory bodies, including the Nursing and Midwifery Council, are available to offer support and reduce the strain upon key workers. Already the physical, mental, and emotional demands of such intensive work on long shifts, wearing protective masks and clothing is being recognized so this volunteered work is important and welcome but not without its own risks.
As with all working in areas of high stress and fatigue, those caring for the most vulnerable, must not become vulnerable themselves. Accelerated into supporting the NHS at such an early stage in their own careers, these student volunteers are the nation’s next generation of healthcare workers. Protecting their own wellbeing, in all senses, is vital. For all frontline players, the selfless exposure to risk, personal fears and fears of letting others down, and the relentless pressure to keep on going are unimaginably tough.
It is a stark reminder of how facing up to emergencies has its longer consequences too.
Voluntary nurses, from Huddersfield and elsewhere, are nothing new and pre-date the founding of the NHS. The British Red Cross Voluntary Aid Detachments [VADs] were active during the First and Second World Wars, in nursing and other duties.
By the end of 1918, about 90,000 VADs had been mobilised to work abroad and in hundreds of small military and auxiliary hospitals across the country. They were predominantly women (but not always); they worked alongside the nursing staff and came from varied backgrounds, often contributing many hours of unpaid support alongside their domestic duties and other paid employment.
Records from local volunteers offer clues to tasks they undertook and the hundreds of hours they contributed in large and smaller care settings in and around Huddersfield. Overseas healthcare workers contributed too, volunteering relief and supplies, including Marie Grant from Jamaica who clocked up nearly 2800 part-time hours over 18 months. Harold Bennett, a VAD from Lepton, traveled with over 30 conveys of wounded soldiers and worked as a nightly orderly.
Their dedication and spirit lives on in the support being offered to healthcare workers during the present crisis
Pictured below are just a couple of those VAD cards from volunteers across Kirklees during the First World War.
You can view and learn more about VAD’s at https://vad.redcross.org.uk/