Cameron Sandilands is an Edinburgh medical student who also works at his local care home. Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, Cami has been fundraising for both the care home and Alzheimer Scotland with online poetry readings. The poems which are his own work, focus on current issues: healthcare, dementia and the pandemic itself.
I have found working in the care home during Covid-19 pretty scary to be honest. We are in full PPE for most of the shift and this is really confusing for our residents. We need to explain constantly why we’re wearing masks so as not to frighten any of our clients with mental health problems.
We have had cases in our home but our infection control has been excellent and has prevented the full load of cases which we were expecting to encounter. Now it’s a matter of never dropping quality even as things look to brighten up over summer.
It’s not very easy to keep clients with dementia in their rooms away from the usual social atmosphere in the home. So keeping them occupied with different activities has been extremely important and I praise our activities coordinators for adapting well to the situation. Recently, we had a guest singer in for a socially-distanced concert where they could request virtually any song they wanted to hear and it brought so much joy to the residents who have been missing this type of entertainment dearly.
#PoemsToRemember
One day, walking around the home at the peak of the pandemic, I began noticing a considerable drop in morale both in residents and staff. I thought “if there’s one thing a home needs to run it is an atmosphere of optimism and hope”, so I decided I would raise money for activities using an old skill of mine: poetry.
My first fundraiser raised over £400 in the first hours of donations but unfortunately had to be stopped due to some policy issues with the employer. All the money that was raised goes toward trips and events for our residents. The response here simply blew me away and really highlighted that we have many amazingly generous people in our community.
I thought I would follow up with a fundraiser for Alzheimer Scotland, who provide crucial support to so many people. At this stage I have four poems uploaded to Facebook, each of them tackling a different topic. My second fundraiser is currently ongoing.
Making friends
I began working in care a month after my 17th birthday. When I first started I was completely overwhelmed by the responsibility and didn’t think that I’d stay for long. But I am so glad that I did!
Once you learn how to do the tasks of the day efficiently, you can create the time to really connect with your residents and I have certainly learned more from them than they have from me. I’ve had the opportunity to meet many amazing people: from recovering alcoholics, to ex-doctors, to paratroopers and every single one of them has taught me something valuable – the ability to stop being a healthcare worker and to be a friend.
Memories
In the years I’ve been working at the care home, there have been plenty of memories and times that stick out.
One time, I’m preparing breakfast for my residents, all sat around the table and I’m trying to juggle seven cups of tea, four bowls of cereal and 10 slices of toast. A resident taps me on the shoulder and says ‘would you like a hand’? She was quite an independent resident so I told her I’d love the help. We then worked together to serve the remaining residents their breakfast and afterwards, we talked about her situation and why she was here. It turns out she had been an alcoholic after she left her abusive husband, and was now in the home as she wanted to go teetotal but needed our support to do so. She left to go home four weeks later having not touched nor asked for a drop of alcohol and I’m proud to say she helped serve all the meals for her remaining time there. I think it helped that helping me with this daily task provided her with a reason to get out of bed in the morning and took her mind off her own situation by helping others.
Working in mental health
Whilst it’s quite hard to say at this stage where I’ll end up in my medical career, I think I’d like to work in a specialty related to mental health problems such as psychiatry or medicine for the elderly.
Working at the care home offers the rare opportunity to spend lots of time with the residents as opposed to a hospital setting which is more time-limited. I think the great conversations I get to have with residents will be what I miss most when I give up the purple scrubs for blue.
Mental health is definitely the most undiagnosed life-ruining illness. Many people who have serious problems cannot get a diagnosis because there is no simple blood test or examination which tells you if something’s wrong. We need to stop saying that people are ‘just anxious’ or ‘just sad’ when there could be something more going on, and we’ll never improve these situations by failing to offer patients the time to talk about how they really feel.
Watch Cami’s poetry readings on his Facebook page
