Remembering Covid-19: Every Story Matters
The UK Covid-19 Inquiry has been set up to look at the country’s response to the pandemic of 2020. They’ve got an independent Ethics Advisory Group overseeing a listening exercise called Every Story Matters.
Every Story Matters is a way of gathering and trying to understand the experiences of ordinary people across the country.
The Dementia Trust, in the middle of the pandemic, already found a way of telling the stories of ordinary people living with dementia, or working in the dementia field, and families, as the situation was unfolding. This was not easy. They did it through a film.
The professional writers did their writing at home, while balancing homeschooling, and just surviving the extraordinary experience of lockdown.
The professional actors learned their lines and rehearsed at home. It helped that one acting family were involved, who were all isolating in the same house.
The professional directors and filmmakers worked with what equipment they had at home – iPads and iPhones. They were quickly taught how to change the settings to get cinema quality video. A Hollywood composer volunteered and composed the musical soundtrack.
And the core of the story, while fictional, was made up from the things that people were telling the Trust. Called Take Me With You, the story tells about care workers, care home managers, families and residents.
Take me With You—A Dementia Trust funded film about care homes during the Covid-19 pandemic
The film includes a Care Worker, Erin, who is recruited to bring her bright energy and love of older people to a dementia care home, and who ends up catching Covid-19, and is terrified that she brought the disease to the people she had learned to love. She is played by a young actor who brought to the part all the stories she heard from her friends who worked in homes at that time.
We see the unfolding story of a Care Home Resident played by TV actor Barbara Rafferty, terrified and crying for her family, who can only look on at her through a window from the garden.
These stories were truthful and include the Care Home Manager talking about the difficulties with untested patients coming in, lack of testing, lack of staff and endless revisions of government guidance.
Please look at these stories again, reflect on your own experience, and make sure you tell your story to the Covid Inquiries in your own country.
Actors from ‘Take me with You’ — Barbara Rafferty, Erin McCardie, Michael McCardie, Maureen Carr and Claire Knight.
