“This is my local hospital – my son was born here and staff have supported my family. I work for this trust and now’s the time for me to give something back.”

Speech and Language Therapist Hannah Carter is usually based at Blakenall Village Centre but her face to face work supporting children and young people and their parents/carers has had to change during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I was really keen to offer my support to the trust at this time and have been involved in sandwich runs to the wards, delivering food to those staff nursing patients with COVID-19 who haven’t been able to leave the wards easily due to wearing PPE,” explained the mother-of-one.

“I will be involved with the Patient Experience Team shortly as we work to support patients to communicate with their families using ipads and other devices while we’ve got the visiting restrictions in place. It must be so difficult for them at the moment – I know how I’d feel if I was affected.

“At this time there’s a number of staff who can’t do their normal daily jobs and it’s a good opportunity to work together as a wider team both hospital and community. For me, my son was born here, prematurely, my husband and I were well supported by maternity services and paediatrics through his follow up appointments and I work at the trust so Walsall Healthcare means a lot to me and my family. I see it as a time for me to give something back.

“And it’s really interesting to widen the circle of colleagues you usually interact with and put faces to emails!”