Since November, I have been volunteering at the Sir Robert Ogden Macmillan Centre at St James's Hospital. This centre offers complementary therapies to cancer suffers and their families and carers. As Covid-19 took hold and began to spread across the country, the centre shut it's doors. After all, it's impossible to give someone a massage whilst socially distancing.
Not long after this, I got an email from Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust (LTHT) Volunteers Services asking if I was interested in being redeployed to do other voluntary work supporting the NHS staff. Of course, I said yes.
Which is how I found myself at St James's on Monday morning, performing the role of sugar dealer. Along with Tif, the Youth Volunteering Manager, I pushed a tall narrow trolley full of boxes of Krispy Kreme Donuts (other donuts are available) in and out of lifts, and up and down the corridors of Bexley Wing. It's interesting just how heavy such a trolley is. Each one had 80 boxes of donuts, very kindly donated by the company for the hospital staff. It was a generous move, but one that posed a logistics problem and, for me, an ethical one.
The logistics problem was: how do you spread this gift around and reach the maximum number of staff without any particular group feeling left out? The answer was: with difficulty. We did our best. We started with the wards first, and that was the easy bit. The longer we spent moving around Bexley, the more obvious it was that not only was word getting out, but that some groups of workers felt that they were going to miss out.
We covered as much ground as we could, including getting lost in the basement, a labyrinth where a lot of the undervalued, but important work goes on. Things that you never think about, but would notice very quickly if they weren't being done; like the laundry, the cleaning, the emptying of bins. Down there are the offices and workspaces of groups like the engineers, the people who handle the deliveries and the radiographers. We also ventured up to the floors above the wards. These are home to workspaces that don't immediately spring to mind when you think about hospitals, like research groups and labs. When we weren't sure about where to go next, we'd ask about, and there was always someone who could point us to an out of the way office or workspace.
After two and half hours, we'd completely cleaned out Tif's trolley, and worked through two thirds of mine. We headed back to Gledhow Wing, the temporary base of the volunteers. The others had covered a few other buildings, and there was only the Trust HQ to be finished off. I distributed the remaining boxes, giving some to offices, and leaving others in communal kitchen areas.
In such a complex organisation, it's hard to cover all bases. Some people are going to be left out; their contribution is virtually invisible to the naked eye. But every now and again, we need to dig out the microscope and look more closely. We should always do our best to acknowledge that everyone is important; everyone contributes to the whole.
And the ethical problem? I'm a fitness instructor with a nutrition and weight management qualification. Giving out that many donuts gave my conscience a twinge. And no, just in case you want to know, I didn't have one myself.
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