The Stay At Home Diaries: Holly Marshall

Our second Stay At Home Diary comes from Holly, Commercial Partnerships Manager at the East Anglian Air Ambulance, who talks about her role, the challenges but perks of working from home and how she is coping during the pandemic.

This article is part of our series, ‘The Stay At Home Diaries’, published every day of the partial lockdown in the UK amid the Coronavirus pandemic. To find out more about this series, click here.

 

I’m Holly, the Commerical Partnerships Manager for the East Anglian Air Ambulance (EAAA). We provide a helicopter emergency medical service across Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire taking a portable A&E unit to people when their lives are at risk. My role is to partner with businesses to create mutually beneficial ways to raise awareness and funds for the charity. I returned to work 5 weeks ago from 11 months off on maternity leave. It’s been quite a whirlwind but due to the nature of our work, EAAA understood early on how serious this all is and has been really supportive of staff from before some of the government measures where put in place. Our crews are still working every day to save lives which I find truly inspirational. We’ve also had colleagues return to the NHS as frontline nurses until this is all over. I am as ever astounded at the commitment medics have to helping people and try to use that stay positive each day. 

The main challenge of staying at home is coordinating with my husband to share childcare as our son can’t go to nursery anymore. Between us, we need to work 60 hours a week so we’ve organised shifts each day to make sure we’re still able to do our jobs.  The main perk for me is the flexibility. I’ve worked from home in previous roles and like that you don’t have to be as rigid with things as if you were in an office. My main tip for new home workers is to lose the guilt. Your working just as hard as when you’re in the office, just in a different way. There are fewer distractions so when you do work, it’s with more intensity. 

 

I developed a cough on Saturday so we’d been self-isolating since the weekend anyway in my household. I’m glad the measures are in place, to be honest, as now there’s no question about what you can and can’t do. I’m spending my time trying to find ways to occupy my son, trying to think of ways to be effective in my job when the whole nature of business has changed, face-timing everyone and anyone and cooking as much as possible. 

 

In terms of things to do when bored, I highly recommend watching The Split on BBC iPlayer. It’s about an all-female family law firm and is highly addictive. Once this is all over, I’m going to have the biggest party possible, not stop hugging people and travel to all the far-flung places I’ve always dreamed of. Like a lot of people, I miss my mum the most!