Is it on the trolley...?

In my day job I work in a non clinical admin and clerical management role at an NHS Trust in London. During the peak of the current surge of the pandemic many of our clinical and clinical support staff have been redeployed to the acute areas to care for our COVID patients. This means many other wards and departments are running on much lower staffing levels as a result there was a call put out for volunteers from corporate (non clinical) areas to volunteer in a variety of support roles. I signed up to do some shifts as a mealtime assistant helping the ward host with the lunchtime meal service. On this shift I was working on one of our high risk COVID wards and so the patients were quite poorly and many had dietary restrictions. My role was to prepare the trays - blue if normal diet or red if a dietary need - and organise them on the trolley in bed order; whilst the ward host prepared the hot items I made sure the cold items were put on the appropriate tray; I then took the trolley out on to the ward and delivered the meal try’s to the patient bedside so the healthcare assistant could feed those who needed help. Once the trays were delivered it was back to the kitchen to wash up the utensils used in making the soup etc and then it was time to go back round the ward collecting the dirty trays and clearing away the left overs and cleaning the trays down for the supper meal service. The two hour shift flew by and gave me a real insight into the amazing work all of our clinical and clinical support staff are doing. All of the processes have slowed down as a result of increased hand washing, cleaning of surfaces and changing PPE when moving between areas so having an extra pair of hands to help out is really appreciated by our catering teams.