Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Fourteen - In At The Deep End

I thought I had come a long way from being the pretend-nurse/people pleaser that I was in the latter days of when I loosely orbited around my parents, whilst I was unemployed in Gainsborough. However much I had progressed in the part time job I was untested in a full time job. Windrush Nursing Home was going to be my first full time nursing assistant job. It would also be my first experience of a shift work job. Stepping out from a comfortable part time job in an office with a contract into shift work, and nursing, with no contract in a private nursing home was me stepping yet again into the unknown and hoping I would get the best out of the situation in a way I had done with my leaving Gainsborough.

Windrush Nursing home was a detached three storey building excluding the cellar, in a row of such dwellings that in Edwardian times were domestic dwellings for a medium to upper class household, complete with a neat garden back and front. Car culture had long done away with the front garden which had become a car park. 

Just as buildings that held bedsits were in modern times were divided into one room households, so nursing homes divided the rooms which once held the sense of space, which was a sign of luxury, the rooms were now full with beds that housed the elderly and infirm who no longer needed much space, in care designed to be commercially sustainable. Between the patient's family, the nursing home owners and the staff who worked there, there was always going to be one party in the deal that drew the short straw. The party that drew the short straw most often were the staff. Part of the deal of being a member of staff was that they always had to be the last to learn this.

It was borderline that I was accepted as care assistant. What got me accepted was that the nursing home was so short staffed at Christmas and New Year. When matron presented the staff shortage with some surprise at the staff shortage happening I could not process what I saw. Her presentation of the job was either mildly naive, or made it seem as if the shortage was nothing to do with her. I took her presentation at face value. When matron posed as naive before me, I could only see with hindsight how calculated her pose of being naive about the staff shortage was. But all credit to her, she calculated very well the level of my naivety and my sense of need-whether I calculated my sense of need well or poorly.

It took me a long time to realise that I had drawn the short straw, and I had not recognised how short it was. Thus it was I entertained my role as a loss leader care assistant in business I did not understand in a situation that my background had not prepared me to appreciate.

If the economics of the job were way above my head, then the mechanics of the job were relatively simple. The staff worked in a house where all trace of it's former grandeur and personality as a building had been erased with it being turned into a nursing home for thirty residents. By day the staff/patient ratio was six patients to one member of staff, by night there were eight patients to one member of staff. The business was owned by two women in their forties, both of whom were married to dentists who worked in the same practice. Where the money that paid for the building and it's conversion was the husbands' money this was the wives' business empire. Every fortnight these two short to medium height women would appear, their hair dyed black and neatly quaffed. Both always wore dark furs. They visited to make sure all was well in the place. Neither of them ever spoke to me and I said little about them. But seeing them walking together, their dark furs sweeping all before them as they brushed against the narrow magnolia painted walls, did remind of some vaguely genteel but threatening scene that might have originated from the pen of Franz Kafka.

The staff were paid £2.20 an hour, rising to £2.40 after the first year. I never stayed long enough to be offered a work contract. The money was just enough to keep those in bedsit land claiming housing benefit, to maintain them as loss leaders in the housing market as well as the employment market. When both job and lodgings were engineered to benefit the few and make loss leaders of the many, then there was only so long that the hand to mouth life could be made to seem sustainable. The sales pitch that justified the loss leader life had to conceal a lot of losses. 

The thirty patients were mostly bedbound and had their beds in six rooms, across three floors, from the ground floor to the attic. With one ground floor room being for just one person. Besides the patient's rooms there was a small Matron's office, and bath/shower rooms and toilets on the ground floor and the first floor. There was a large kitchen next to a living room lined with comfy chairs, where a television could often be heard addressing nobody in particular. Last and least was a small well maintained garden beyond the living room that was there for show for relatives seeking a space for their relatives. The staff had zero privacy: they took their tea breaks on the foyer on the ground floor where they were on call to be sociable to any passing residents. Several of the residents could walk and in their dementia would ask whoever was in sight every five minutes 'Have you seen me mother? Only I was meant to be seeing her...  ...I don't know where she is.'. If we even slightly hinted at a less than deferential and appeasing answer to this question repeated every five minutes then matron would have heard us saying it.

Even the slightest intemperate thought was not worth the risk, even if we assumed that in their dementia the patient would not remember us saying anything. The way the building was arranged made feeling claustrophobic seem normal. We might as well have hallucinated that  the walls had ears given how much the staff were made responsible for any aggression that the lack of personal space and packed layout of the home both engineered and denied. The only space where there was some degree of room to openly ask 'Why are we doing this?' was in the laundry room in the cellar. It was the only place in the home that no resident ever went near.

With the distance of hindsight I don't know how long it should have taken me to adjust to a thirty five hour week of shift work, morning - 7am through to 2 pm, day time 9 am through to 4 pm and evening 4 pm through to 10 pm, where the only allotted slack moment in the day was our break. Even then we had to stand or lean in the small foyer, talking to residents as they passed. The nearest thing to a perk was that we sometimes got were free meals from the kitchen that fed the residents, but even there that perk was mostly meant to make us available for more work. The best description for the place was to call it 'a care factory'. That factory like urge of making maximum use of all available space. It was self evident that there was no physical space allotted for mental retreat from why the place was organised as it was.

The staff/patient ratio was what determined how tiring the work might be. In a care home for the elderly with dementia that also cares for it's workers as well a ratio of four patients to one front line member of staff was stretching it, but left no slack in the system. In Windrush Nursing Home the daytime staff/patient ratio was one member of staff to six patients, which in addition the lack of rest from the shifting shift patterns made the staff more or less perpetual motion machines. There was one other male nursing assistant, every other nursing assistant was female and most of them were in their early twenties. One black woman who was in here fifties was the nearest there was to my idea of being fun to work with. 

l don't know how many times I was on duty with her on the evening shift, starting to put residents to bed, and I asked her 'Have you got a pencil?', to which she did not need to have a reply. My next line was 'Well, first we have to draw the curtains.'. All I will say in my defence is that repetitive jobs require repetitive humour to leaven the pressured circularity that the jobs create.

Please left click here for Chapter Fifteen.