A TAVISTOCK area care worker has spoken out about how the nurses’ and ambulance workers’ strikes will affect the people she cares for.

Coralie James works with patients in their own homes in the Tavistock area.

She expressed sympathy for nurses striking again next Wednesday and Thursday. However she said home carers were just as demoralised — and facing a similar shortage of staff.

‘They are striking for a reason, but it is the patients suffering in the long run and I think it is really hard across the board for everyone,’ she said. ‘People need to understand that we are front-line workers too and the pressure we are on is just as much, in fact probably even more because we become part of each individual’s life and their family. It is very personal, clients look forward to seeing us, we become their lifeline.’

Coralie added: ‘It is heartbreaking, the NHS is struggling a lot at the moment, but community carers are too.

‘We are having to cancel things like social visits for our clients because we haven’t got the staff. There are so many shortages.’

She said this was leaving the remaining staff overloaded and facing burnout.

‘A lot of them are having time off, either because of sickness or complete exhaustion, because a lot of them have been working 12 hours a day. It has been heartbreaking recently working in home care.’

She added: ‘I have been in the care industry for nine years and when I first started I absolutely loved it. You become like family to the people you look after, especially when you see them every day. Over the past nine months, though, it has got really depressing.’

She said that over the past year, the deaths of clients had affected her deeply because she became attached to them.

To this is added the day to day difficulties of staff shortages in both home and hospital care, which had each impacted on the other. ‘Over the past few months we have been waiting for ambulances for clients to be taken into A&E and then finding the hospital not having any beds for the clients to go into, which then prevents them getting the medical attention they need at the time.’

One of the reasons for the shortage of beds is the lack of home care workers like Coralie out in the community, which means patients cannot be discharged from hospital to free up beds.

‘It is really difficult, because at the moment so many people are having to stay in hospital as there are just not enough community carers,’ she said.

Coralie, who lives in Horrabridge, visits people in a seven or eight mile radius of Tavistock. She said that the care company she works for looks after 65 people in their own homes. The company could take care for more, but ‘we are having to turn people away because we don’t have the staff to be able to assist them’.

She said that for people like herself, the lack of staff on the ground in the community was really upsetting. It meant that they had to spread themselves too thin and ‘extras’ like social visits had to be cut back. ‘We are a care company and when we say care, we really care, we are really caring individuals and we start feeling a bit lost in our jobs because we can’t give as much as we used to, because we haven’t got the carers out there to be able to do the work. We are really really thin on the ground, carers in the community.’

She said that after meeting ambulance crew who had been called out to a neighbour, she had considered a career change to work for the ambulance service, but has decided this would be a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire.

‘I thought about going into the ambulances, I have been thinking about it for quite some time. Now, I don’t feel I would be able to see people who are really poorly having to wait for hours outside hospital in the back of an ambulance. It really is heartbreaking.’