#surreywomen - baking cakes for NHS staff on the frontline

25th November 2020

Cake

Submitted by Laura Greene, Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

Imagine a cake train that starts in the community, Esher, Surrey to be precise, and ends up on the front line of the NHS. Elizabeth Meatyard is a seasoned volunteer at Kingston Hospital, having founded the Dining Companions successful initiative and being an active volunteer on the Cancer Patient Partnership Group.

In April 2020, Elizabeth used her personal What's App Group to establish #surreywomen, a group of 13 volunteer bakers for Kingston Hospital. Some baked, some sourced scarce ingredients such as self-raising flour, some bought cake boxes to survive the car journeys and stairs up to the wards. Elizabeth and the #surreywomen delivered catering quality cakes for Kingston Hospital staff working on the front line of care, from A&E to Pathology and everywhere in between at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, twice per week, Tuesday and Friday for 12 weeks April - end of June 2020.

Not only was a team of community volunteers hard at work baking and sourcing ingredients, the Volunteering Team collaborated with Elizabeth to forge a way to get cake from Esher to the front-line of care. The demand to take a break at the front-line was palpable. There were tears upon our arrival with cake and hot drinks on more than one occasion.

The Volunteering Team collaborated with Elizabeth to organise a team of x3 daily Health & Wellbeing Volunteers to attend the Hospital site in person during the pandemic who had a unique volunteering role. Upon receipt of the cakes from Elizabeth who drove them personally to the Hospital, the volunteers would:

- Collect the cakes

- Call wards and arrange a collection time and safe rendezvous

- Take the cakes along with trays of hot tea, coffee and a cold drinks trolley to the rendezvous point

- Deliver caffeine and sugar to the front line with a smile and Volunteering Team positivity

Elizabeth is a wonderful example of how people can turn their hobbies into necessities during times of crisis that genuinely helps others. Unfazed by her Dining Companion volunteering role being stepped down in March 2020, she moved quickly to mobilise her own community of friends. As an ex-nurse herself, Elizabeth recognised that nurses at the front line needed rest, respite and to know that the community cared about them. Elizabeth directly improved patient care by keeping the morale of 3000 members of staff high with her baking and concern. Elizabeth and #surreywomen baked over 5,000 slices of cake during Covid-19 - please do search #surreywomen on twitter for some lovely photos and testimony to the gratitude that staff felt when they received some sugar, caffeine and a well deserved break, even just 5 minutes away from the shop floor.

Please search #surreywomen on Twitter for an abundance of almost daily tweets from staff showing their appreciation for Elizabeth and her amazing team of #surreywomen bakers.

Not only were her cakes amazing in quality (In one of her many lives, Elizabeth is a caterer), but Elizabeth had the ingenuity to find a volunteering role she could do from home during the pandemic. She then influenced the Volunteering Team to facilitate her idea with a troop of daily volunteers willing to traverse the breadth of the hospital site with our humble supermarket trolleys and visit 3,000 members of staff, ensuring that colleagues from diverse departments such as Mortuary, Switchboard and Histology received their sugar and caffeine fix.

#surreywomen is a unique example of volunteering mobilising a community resource, in this case, the skills of our bakers to touch those working at the front line of care and frequently unable to take breaks during the demands of working through the pandemic.


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