The quiet achievers making life better For our most vulnerable

A healthy meal or a friendly chat can be life-changing, writes Allyson Warrington

BEFORE COVID-19, how many Australians could truthfully describe what an epidemiologist did?

But the expertise of people like Dr Norman Swan and Professor Mary-Louise McLaws have helped us understand the pandemic and the decisions of governments — some good, some not so — to keep Australians safe.

Before COVID-19, how many of us had done an online Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Webex meeting? OK, most of us had FaceTimed a loved one.

But now the workplace has changed forever, with people now acclimatised to meeting and working online with colleagues in the state, across

Australia and around the world. What we have had again proved to us is how our society relies upon its various teams of frontline responders, nurses, doctors, police officers and now defence force personnel standing guard at some Hobart hotels.

Understandably, the media focus has been on the mighty work done every day by nurses and doctors to control the pandemic, putting their own lives at risk to keep their fellow community members safe.

But I also want to talk about how, across Australia, people working in the community sector are playing similar, but different, roles to keep people safe and healthy.

At Community Based Support, we work with 3500 Tasmanians who require aged care and disability care services. We have 350 dedicated staff who provide these much needed services to our clients. During Tasmania’s coronavirus lockdown in 2020, our staff were performing their roles every day, assisting some of the most vulnerable people in our community. And they continue to do so in 2021.

We had to close our Social Hubs in the South and North of the state because of COVID-19, which had a great impact on so many of our clients, who rely on the social interaction with fellow clients at the Hub.

But we pivoted, like so many businesses and organisations in the state, to continue to service our clients.

We started doing meal deliveries to clients, which had a twofold effect for them.

One, at the height of the Tasmanian lockdown, ensured they were receiving quality, healthy meals — some daily.

We also discovered that some of our elderly clients were too scared to go to the local supermarket for their usual grocery selection and were eating very poorly indeed.

Two, the social interaction, the social connection was paramount for our clients, some of whom are extremely elderly and some living on their own. Just the daily, or

thrice weekly, delivery of meals meant that a client got to have a face-to-face interaction with one of our staff, in a totally COVID-safe way.

For those clients who didn’t need our food delivery services, we started ringing them regularly to ask: “How are you? How are you going? Do you need anything?”

This year we are continuing to deliver meals to clients, because some of them have found this new service to be one they want to continue.

We have also gone back to our regular home services for many clients, which can be gardening, spring cleaning, home maintenance or personal care. All of these provide the opportunity for social interaction between our aged care or disability staff members and our clients. And that social interaction is critical to good mental health.

Our domestic assistance, the gardening and spring cleaning, means a cleaner, healthier and safer living space for our clients, with less dust.

We also ensure our clients take their various medications when they are due, as well as assisting them with additional support. We don’t advise outside our areas of expertise, but we can suggest avenues from where they can receive it.

In simple terms, the community sector assists Tasmanians to live healthier lives.

We know at Community Based Support that many of our aged care clients want to stay in their own homes, which in turn lessens the pressure on a stretched aged care industry in terms of facilities. Our clients remain vulnerable. That is the nature of their existence.

But Community Based Support and organisations like ours stand ready in 2021 and beyond, to make sure our clients live their best lives — healthy and as independent as they can achieve.