Cameron Buchan – Road Policing Sergeant with the Roads Policing Unit, West Yorkshire Police, Ruth Buchan – CEO, Community Pharmacy West Yorkshire

Cameron:
"I deal with the roads of West Yorkshire and work out of Bradford covering Calderdale, Kirklees and Bradford plus the motorway network with 5 teams of 12 on a rota basis, so we are spread reasonably thin. Policing is a unique profession that responds to whatever is going on and adapts to continue the service we give and Corvid-19 has meant that some things have lessened but others have increased. For example has been a marked decrease in traffic but this means that opportunities such as to speed has risen and some people will do what they do regardless of rules. We protect people and that hasn’t gone away and we’ve been ready to step up had the lockdown not had the desired effect.
On an operational level we’ve had to rearrange the office to have better social distancing and deal with comings and goings of the various shifts to make sure we don’t brush passed each others shoulders and it’s the little things like that that can take a lot of organising and a lot of logistics, plus there’s the PPE situation, the hospitals have got it bad but we’re in a similar situation although we don’t need it as much as the medical profession. However we’re more likely to encounter people who will deliberately want to come up close and do silly things like spit etc and we just have to be able to cope with that. We’ve a good occupational health unit that look after us and there is testing in place should we need it and I’m constantly looking after my staff to make sure they are good and moral is high."

Ruth:
"We are the organisation which represents all 552 community pharmacies in West Yorkshire. What we’ve been doing in response to corvid is to help our pharmacy teams help patients, and they have been doing an absolutely fantastic job in staying open, keeping the supply to people, answering questions, being the front door for the NHS. Its my job to help support all the pharmacies and to work on their behalf with the NHS and local authorities to look at what services we need to provide and what things we need to do differently. I think the toughest part is knowing how hard they are all working, doing such a tough job, and how it’s not been recognised nationally with funding. The difficulty for me is also seeing how tough it is for all our teams who are really busy and having to work differently. Most patients are marvellous but some haven’t been great and can be abusive having to queue outside and its taking longer to get the prescriptions. That has been really hard to hear."

4.5.20