Faces of the Fight: Laveena Tratch

The immunization campaign brings hope: hope to our most vulnerable; hope for families who are afraid for their parents, their children, their neighbours, themselves; hope to our healthcare workers, our essential service workers, our teachers, our community.

Hope is a powerful emotion; I have had the privilege to see the vulnerability that hope creates in our staff and leaders. The excitement that our teams have as they prepare for their day, knowing they are impacting the lives of those who receive the vaccine. The excitement in the long-term care homes and personal care homes as our teams enter to give them their vaccines. This excitement is hope.

I have also witnessed the anguish they experience when we need to make difficult decisions regarding the sequencing of our limited vaccine resources; they do this within an ethical framework and handle this responsibility with professionalism and dedication.

No one person or service can carry out this vaccine campaign alone. Over the last weeks, I have witnessed leaders and staff from continuing care, occupational health, primary health care, acute care, outpatient services, security, lab, physicians, our support services and others work side by side with our community partners to deliver this vaccine. Before the pandemic, this would not have likely occurred. We were all busy doing our work, in our own way and didn’t need others to accomplish our tasks.

To be successful with this campaign we need each other. We cannot work like we have previously worked. We must work differently, with different partners, and community members.

I have seen our teams building new relationships with other colleagues, building new teams, and a new way of working together to share the work in ways we have not done before.

It gives us hope that the work we do together will support our residents, their families, our community to be safe and healthy, It gives us hope that when this pandemic is finally over, we will be stronger because we did it together.