2020 – Year in Review

28th December 2020

2020 – that was quite a year!

I’m on my own in the office today to do the PPE runs to the door, whilst everyone else is working from home or out on care calls, and I’ve just had the privilege of speaking with one of our longest-standing care staff, J, about the kind of year it has been.

It would be easy to dismiss 2020 as a negative year and of course very many people have had a terrible time, and my heart goes out to them, but as the year draws to a close I also think what a life-enhancing year it has been for seeing people’s amazing qualities as they care for one another.

Volunteering to drive around delivering medication, looking out for elderly or vulnerable neighbours, continuing to teach small children when it’s almost impossible to shield effectively, work where there are hyper-concentrations of other people such as supermarkets, figuring out the home-schooling of children, long shifts in Intensive Care Units and all hospital departments (often without appropriate PPE), and all the ordinary stuff of life which now bears risk.

At the business level, thousands of people showing resilience in how they adapt to ever-changing circumstances with huge determination in order to keep the jobs of their staff as intact as possible, and I think particularly of my dear wife Suky who has successfully transformed her whole way of delivering training onto Zoom.

There are a thousand other examples, but today I am thinking especially of our own care team who have kept on going, firstly in March and April when many clients and their families decided to self-isolate, which reduced our work, right through to now when we are extremely busy at a time of increased risk.

It is not any exaggeration to say that they display heroism, humour, resilience and dignity every single day. Their Christmas present included for each person, a framed cartoon of themselves as a Right at Home superhero which seemed to go down well!