Laura Green – Cygnet Team Leader, NHS

"I’m working with Swan End of Life and Bereavement team which works across the Northern Care Alliance which is 5 hospitals across Manchester and the Nightingale and the community. My job is 3 fold really - it’s to look after staff who are seeing much more death and dying than normal; the second part is to support patients who are dying and make sure nobody dies on their own and the 3rd part is to keep families supported and informed. We do a lot of memento work, going into care homes, going onto wards and we facilitate online Zoom and Skype conversations with families so that the can say goodbye and we are trying to develop the capacity in care homes where lots and lots of people are very unwell at the moment and aren’t able to have visitors and trying to make families feel as involved as they can be.
I’ve just been redeployed for this pandemic for 3 months to develop this service – my usual role is as a lecturer in end of life care in Manchester University. It’s been shocking and horrible to see the intensity and frequency of death and dying but it’s been astonishing because all of the barriers and usual areas of bureaucracy that stand in the way of doing things creativity in the health service have vanished. (For instance) we had an idea to have a daily conference call with every provider in the community, social care, health care, hospice, hospital and we find out who is in need in the community and we despatch people to those places and things are moving so quickly - I only joined three weeks ago and we had our first staff going out to provide end of life care within about 5 days so it’s the speed, the collaboration and team work and the creativity are amazing. It’s a time of extremes in both directions.
I’m a Cygnet Team Leader and Cygnets are redeployed NHS staff whose normal NHS roles are not happening so speech and language therapists, organ transplants staff, post operative and pre-operative assessment nurses – we’re training them up to do end of life care. I’m one of 3 team leaders across the alliance so I have a team of 4 of these redeployed staff who are amazingly stepping up to the play and my role is to find out where they are needed, to support them and send them out across the Alliance which is really amazing."

29.4.20