Highland woman who lost her mum to Covid looks back at challenging first month of lockdown
One of the hardest moments of the pandemic was, for many, finding themselves abruptly separated from their loved ones.
Lockdown forced people at home, and with travel restrictions in place, for many it became impossible to reach family members living further away.
For healthcare settings such as care homes or hospitals, whose residents were particularly vulnerable, the challenge was even more complex.
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For Easter Ross resident Melanie Newdick, it was a shock when, one day, she went to visit her mother in an Invergordon care home, she and her sister found the door shut, and a message announcing that visits were no longer allowed.
“We had no prior notice,” she explains.
“And, because mum had dementia, we literally had no way of contacting her, even to let her know that we weren't able to visit as she did not recognize voices on the phone and couldn’t use a tablet or other devices.”
A former NHS Highland Health board member, Ms Newdick said she started researching other ways in which care homes were finding ways to allow visits to some extent, and eventually convinced the care home where her mother was in, Kintyre House, to allow relatives to communicate to their relatives through a window.
“We were allowed 30 minutes, once a week initially - with just one person allowed.
“However, it’s quite hard communicating with somebody who has dementia through a window that's closed. It was a very difficult time.”
Months passed and although no cases seemed to emerge within the care home, rules for visitors remained strict. After five months of being unable to see her mother face-to-face, Ms Newdick wrote to then health secretary Jeane Freeman, calling for more flexibility to be applied on visiting rules.
Times passed, and although some form of in-person visits were allowed, they were very rare occasions. Then, when a member of staff was recorded as having been in contact with someone who tested positive for Covid, Ms Newdick decided to bring her mother back home.
She said: “In the 18 months between the lockdown at the care home and when she came home I only had two face-to-face visits.”
However Ms Newdick was only able to spend two more weeks with her mother, before she passed away at home, after contracting Covid.
“We both tested negative at first,” she said.
“The care home said they would not release her without a negative Covid test. So, I was negative, and then I decided to take mum to get her vaccine, as she had not received it in the care home yet. But we came back home and took another test the same afternoon. We both tested positive.
“We were forced to stay at home, and no one could come and visit us. I just nursed mum on my own at home through the last week, which she spent in bed, until she died on the Friday.
“It was the longest, loneliest week of my life. But I'm so glad mum was at home, she was with someone she loved who could look after her.”
Ms Newdick eventually joined the Scottish Covid Bereaved Families group - through which she also became involved with the Scottish and UK Covid inquiries, the latter still ongoing.
“Initially, I didn't want to be part of the group, because I felt guilty in a way. So many people had to say goodbye over a mobile phone or an iPad, if they got to say goodbye. They didn't even get to be in the same room.
“However, although I have been told by some that I was lucky. I don’t feel lucky. I'm not pleased she got Covid, and I'm not pleased that we had such a horrendous time with a care home.”
At least 10 other residents at Kintyre House back then lost their lives due to reasons linked to the virus.
Working in tourism, Ms Newdick was also impacted by the effects of the pandemic on a professional level.
However during that time, she was involved in a UK-wide study conducted on Covid-19, collecting blood samples or saliva samples from households on a regular basis for these to be analysed and reported to the Office of National Statistics. That helped indicate which strains of Covid were where in the country, how far they'd spread, as well as how people were affected by long Covid.
She said: “I felt really proud to be involved in it because it felt like it was doing something really positive and meaningful, when it was such a difficult time.
“I'm so glad I was in the Highlands, people were lovely. Because we couldn't go into the houses, people used to make up seats in their garage with heaters, and I remember my very last call was a farm up in Caithness, and they just had some lambs and they took me in to see them.
“People in the Highlands just amazing, so it was a great place to be doing that too.”
Although the data collection effort halted, Ms Newdick’s efforts to raise awareness of the risks of poor prevention and inequalities in the healthcare system have not.
During the UK Covid inquiry, she raised concerns over the impact of a health-board based vaccination delivery system, a scheme which she finds unfit for the rural communities of the Highlands.
“We're not great at preventing problems,” she said.
”Whether that’s a pandemic or other preventable health conditions.
“If there is something interesting that is emerging from the Covid Inquiry, is that we haven’t learned much at all.
“It would be fantastic if we took the people that find accessing vaccinations the hardest, and we built the systems around them. Then everybody else would be able to access it. But we don't. We do it the other way around.”
Looking back at that March 23 five years ago, she said it feels like it belongs “to a different lifetime”.
“It's kind of crazy really, to think that it’s been five years,” she said.
“In some ways, it seems like a whole other lifetime. In some ways it seems like five minutes.
”In some moments I still think I'm gonna ring mum and tell her something. And then realize I'm not going to be able to ring her. But I still tell her anyway.”
