Our teams have shown immense dedication and bravery throughout the pandemic by prioritising the health of our beneficiaries over themselves. Support Workers and Hospital to Home Coordinators delivered services both in the community and at Community Hospital Rehabilitation wards where the virus had been most prevalent. Through providing these front line services some staff were directly affected and contracted COVID-19, but once they had recovered, they continued to be committed to their work supporting patients with the virus.

In order to protect the health and safety of clients and carers as well as our staff and volunteers, Age Concern Hampshire (ACH) Care and Wellbeing Centres were closed from March 2020.  As these services provide a lifeline for many vulnerable older people in our community, the precautions caused involuntary isolation and loneliness for many of those we support. Similarly, unpaid carers have been under immense pressure to support the ‘cared for’ alone without access to respite or additional help.

Our Information Service continued to operate throughout the pandemic with our dedicated team of volunteers giving many hours of their time to answer queries from anxious members of the public.

Our volunteers within the Village Agent and Basingstoke Wellbeing services adapted their work to provide phone calls instead of group/home visits and were joined by new volunteers to make regular calls to people who were feeling isolated. Many of these regular calls are still being made while we wait for local groups and coffee mornings to restart.

We are now finding that months of shielding at home has had a detrimental effect on many older people we support causing muscle weakness from deconditioning. This can commonly result in a reduced sense of balance and increase the risk of falls. Similarly, many clients have been struggling with depression, low mood, lack of support for meal preparation, deteriorating physical health, increased pain due to untreated health conditions and a general loss of hope. This has also affected  appetites and diets, which in turn threatened to weaken their resilience still further.

Lastly, as a an independent charity, COVID-19 significantly hindered our ability to sustain support to beneficiaries as ACH was forced to close all revenue generating  services leading to a loss of 88% of our revenue income. Therefore, we have been even more reliant on the generosity of the communities, grant funders and local councils to sustain services for those considered most vulnerable. 

To ensure our charity can carry on supporting its beneficiaries now and in the future, ACH have taken the learnings from the last year to ‘Survive, Adapt and Thrive’. We have learned many valuable lessons  as a result of the pandemic, mainly the extraordinary resilience and commitment of our workforce who have shown incredible bravery by prioritising the needs of those we support over themselves. This especially applies to those working in high risk work places such as Community Hospitals on wards with COVID patients.