Alicia Hossack
“We’re making the best of it so we can still provide the best patient care possible.”
As a porter for eleven years, Alicia Hossack has enjoyed a career at The Moncton Hospital that is more ‘behind the scenes’. The past two years, she and her colleagues have not only stepped up to take on more responsibilities, it’s also brought her, in her words, “out of her shell’.
“It’s a whole different world now. As a team, we’ve always been friendly and good at our jobs but maybe not as outgoing as others. I considered myself a little bit shy, but now we have been interacting with patients more to make sure they feel comfortable and safe. Even with masks on, we make that extra effort to speak as clearly as we can and make a lot of eye contact and gestures, knowing it can be difficult to catch what you’re saying, especially if there’s a hearing disability.”
“Traditionally we take the patients from their floor to their tests or we take them for surgery, so often we are the last contact that they see before they go for their procedure. Since COVID began, we’ve taken on more. Before it was mostly inpatients and now we do outpatient appointments, taking charge of the visitors when they come in.”
“We’ve changed our procedures to adapt more to the pandemic, we will probably keep a lot of those procedures because they do work more effectively for us. We realize we can’t get frustrated about little things that don’t matter. We just have to see the bigger picture, so I think we will definitely apply that going forward.”
Both at work and at home, Alicia recognizes the challenges all families are facing in New Brunswick and around the world.
“My husband also works at the hospital, so we had to ensure that we were doing all of the safety protocols that were put into place and we were being as cautious as we could just to keep our family safe along with everyone else’s families.”
“The kids were home for a lot of the year. Learning from home is a different skill that they had to pick up. My oldest son would prefer to go to school every day. Doing distance learning was not his favourite thing, so when they thought they were going back to school he was pretty excited.”
Why does Alicia enjoy what she does, even in these difficult times?
“Knowing that every day when you go in you have a good support system to work with and a good team working toward the same bottom line makes it so much easier and enjoyable for everyone. I always thought that we had a pretty strong team to start with, but I really noticed some changes in our group dynamic, now that we do work closely with other departments. Together, we are like a well-oiled machine at this point, very eager to help each other and very good at pitching in. Everyone's on board and they’ve really been trying their best throughout the pandemic.” – Alicia Hossack, Porter
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Right now, you can ensure everyone in our community receives the best care possible by giving to the Friends of The Moncton Hospital Foundation.
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