Meet Kate Hughes, one of our homes’ heroes!

Despite the current situation with Coronavirus, thousands of our colleagues up and down the country are ‘keeping calm and carrying on’ to make sure our residents are well looked after.

Kate Hughes, Housekeeper, Hatfield House in Doncaster shared her experiences with us.

I love flower arranging and I’ve been coming in on my days off to help residents create some beautiful displays. We’ve taken lots of photos and they look amazing on our noticeboard.

I don’t always get time to do activities while I’m working as a housekeeper although many of our lovely residents look out for me when I come in and we have a chat.

I’ve been a housekeeper at Hatfield House for just over two years and I just love working here - and I love our residents, everything we do is for them and I really miss them when I’m not here.

We’re a great team too, we’ve become really close and it’s feels like we’re a big happy family, particularly since our Home Manager, Tanya, started here. With the challenges of Coronavirus we’re supporting each other more. We’re all doing everything we can to keep our residents happy and safe. We’re being flexible to cover shifts if anyone is off and we’re helping with other jobs if we’re needed.

My husband is the handyperson here too, in fact we sometimes see more of each other at work than at home! We’ve changed our routine at home to reduce the risk of infection. For example, we’re not going shopping at the moment, our family are kindly doing that for us.

And of course, there’s been some changes to how we work, such as using hand sanitiser outside the home, changing into our workwear once we’re in the building and lots more handwashing to name just a few of the changes. And in my role as a housekeeper we’ve made sure we’re stocked up on the right cleaning materials and are following the procedures closely.

Apart from this it just feels like it usually does in the home and we’re keeping it normal for the people who live here. We’re all pulling together, working hard and having fun with the residents.