“I work at the hospital and the care home facility as the housekeeping and laundry supervisor. I’ve been working in health care for over 20 years. Every morning since the pandemic has started I go in at 6 a.m. and start by washing the staff uniforms.
I also help by filling in for shifts where I’m needed. I walk around and see what everyone needs help with. We have an open door policy in our place. So if anybody has issues they can just bring it to me and we try to work through it. I’m a people person and I really enjoy my job.
We have a bunch of housekeepers who are taking advantage of the Health Career Access Program to become care aides so we have a lot of new hires. I tell all of the new staff that being part of a union is a good thing. You get good wages, benefits and a pension to look forward to.
We just opened up a brand new kitchen with state of the art appliances and we’re also developing a huge ICU (Intensive Care Unit) which will open in 2 years, so we’re seeing lots of growth at our hospital.
At the start of the pandemic, because everything was changing so rapidly, we just made sure we had lots of communication.
I find that because we're quite a small facility and we just lean a lot more on each other, our staff has grown a lot closer. There’s a lot more unity.
Every Friday during the pandemic, we started to order takeout from a restaurant in town for lunch. Everyone would sign up and I would go and pick it up. We wanted to help support our community and local restaurants.”
Susan, housekeeping supervisor, part of the health care team