Manyara Muyenziwa is the nominated individual at Rhodsac Community Living, a service that operates residential care homes and supported living facilities. In her leadership role, Muyenziwa has been responsible for heading up the service’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic from early last year, and as has been the case for all care sector operators, it has been a tremendous challenge for the Rhodsac to navigate, with early PPE shortages and high levels of anxiety among staff and residents throughout having to be carefully managed.
Sharing her experiences of the crisis with the Leaders Council’s Matthew O’Neill, however, Muyenziwa said that it was the ability of leaders to step up in times of crisis which distinguishes good leaders from the rest.
Muyenziwa said: “Leadership is a way of thinking, and even more so during crisis times you are under much more significant amounts of pressure to be able to make critical decisions in not a lot of time. In making these decisions, you must consider all the other stakeholders and continue to ensure compliance with moral and legal obligations. Times of crisis, therefore, make you realise that has a leader you have to be more strong and more confident to guide everyone through, and before you can step up and help anyone else you almost have to anchor yourself and make sure you believe in your own abilities, and this means you can then be stronger for your staff once you have faith in yourself.”
In Muyenziwa’s view, a confident leader is one that is able to impose their own positivity upon their team, which for her leadership throughout the pandemic has proven vital in maintaining focus and morale among her care team.
“Your staff look up to you as a leader, and how successful your response is and how confident you are at the helm is filtered down through the whole team and that can create a positive feeling. So as a leader you have to be the calm in the storm, leading everybody through with composure, delegating tasks to make sure everyone has something to focus on, and this calm aura will rub off on everybody and having a continued focus will make things easier for everybody.
“Leaders are measured by how they react in times of crisis and times of crisis bring out true leadership. During a pandemic like Covid-19, sometimes you do not have a lot of time to respond and pause, you have to be able to make quick and carefully considered decisions. It has really made me think about how I lead, for sure.”
When asked to talk about her personal leadership style, Muyenziwa explained that both in the everyday running of Rhodsac Community Living, and indeed through the pandemic, she has based her leadership style on understanding the strengths and shortcomings of her staff and utilising that knowledge to ensure each member of the team is working in areas of the service where they will be most effective.
Muyenziwa elaborated: “My leadership style in a figurative sense is almost like getting everyone around a table and understanding exactly what each person’s strengths and weaknesses are. By communicating with each member of your team closely, you do not only understand where they will be best placed when it comes to key decision-making, but you also get an idea of their fears and anxieties and you can then manage those as a leader too. Once you know what they are afraid of but also what they are good at, you can give them something to focus on and when they are then focussed on what they are doing, they can almost block any external fears out.”
Having not encountered any specific role models within the health and social care industry during her career and having initially come from a scientific background, Muyenziwa added that her leadership style is one that she has had to develop herself as she has found her own way in the sector, and that growing into her leadership role has been a challenge, albeit one that she has relished.
“Without any real role models of my own in the health industry, I have had to essentially learn as I go along in terms of leading because I come from a more scientific background. I apply my experiences from my earlier career, and then I have had to learn more about the community and mental health side of things over the years. So, developing into a leader in this field has been quite challenging.”
Indeed, by her own admission, Muyenziwa is still learning more about being a care sector leader to this day and is determined to maintain the highest standards of care within Rhodsac even in the thick of a health crisis.
She said: “I am still learning even now through my experiences, but it is a challenge that has helped me develop as a person. I will also give some credit to the Care Quality Commission. They provide a framework of standards that I must live up to as a leader and that has almost acted as a guardianship for me in helping understand the high standards to which I must run the service, and in my role, I am determined to ensure we continue to live up to this, whatever circumstances we find ourselves in.”
When asked more specifically about how Covid-19 had thrust challenges upon her and the wider sector, Muyenziwa highlighted a lack of clarity over the correct usage of PPE an early problem and suggested that communication could have been far more effective.
"There was no communication in regards to the right use of PPE, especially on repeated use. This has actually caused a wide spread of the virus and communities have been inadvertently using contaminated PPE. The lack of advice on how many times PPE can be used before discarding has been a detriment to the healthcare sector and all across communities, as some people were not sticking religiously to the correct use of it.
"The introduction of nasal sprays like Taffix have meant that some members of our community think that they could go out without wearing masks for at least five hours. All this information should have been communicated clearly to the public as to the true efficacy of these nasal sprays and other treatments so that the message is the same across the board regarding advice on the effectiveness and reliability of prevention against the virus. A communication platform with updates on various vaccines and any sprays should have been available for our communities to access verified and trusted information early on."
As the pandemic has wore on, Muyenziwa has been pleased to see testing rolled out on an incredible scale, since regular testing was not accessible to care home workers in the early part of last year.
"It is good to see that testing has been rolled out on a massive scale in this country, that has been helpful for the country to know the actuals rather than the predicted algorithm figures that science could as far provide to use as guideline. With the new variant, it has been required for the country to take an imperative approach rather than an aleatoric one, for leaving things to chance could only result in reproduction numbers staying above the R number."
In order to prevent rising cases, Muyenziwa suggested that it may have been better for the UK government to impose stricter lockdowns over Christmas rather than allow for a day of mixing and have to enforce stricter and more prolonged measures into the New Year.
She reflected: "It would have been good to impose full lockdowns over Christmas so that the numbers would not have skyrocketed as seen soon after Christmas and into the new year. This new variant was spreading faster that the previous one, but though the reaction was slower than intended, the rates of infection numbers are slowing down now which is proving that the current restrictions are working."
Moving on to address the ongoing vaccine rollout in the UK, while appreciative that healthcare workers were first included among the priority groups to receive the jab, Muyenziwa remained concerned that those in other key industries should be nearer the front of the queue than was the case. Although reassured that the issue is starting to be addressed by Westminster, she feels that workers in different sectors could have been given priority earlier.
Muyenziwa explained: "Prioritising the distribution of the vaccine has been recommended by the WHO as well disease control and prevention centres, and the distribution chain has seen health care staff and the elderly receiving their initial inoculation in this country. As well as this, the speed of distribution has been better than in other countries. Although this gave early hope of easing fear and distress by overcoming the virus through the early introduction of the Pfizer vaccine, its storage requirements proved to be a non-practical issue for mass application, yet the Oxford-AstraZeneca and Moderna vaccines have since come in as much more hopeful practical replacements, for they can be stored at room temperature and not only that, they are cheaper too.
"The only issue was that prioritisation was only limited to the healthcare industry, but as time went on, it has been noted by government that other civil sectors such as the police force and education sector required prioritisation too. It would have been good to work out the chain of distribution earlier on as the pandemic panned out so that prioritisation was not only limited to the health sector initially, but extended to those others requiring it as well."
While having three available vaccine types only bodes well for the UK vaccination programme, Muyenziwa suggested that the wider array of options is leading to some confusion and some concern among those eligible as to which vaccine they ought to have and the UK's political and health leaders could have provided clearer communication on this issue sooner.
"In our communities as care workers, we needed better communication on the different types of vaccines that are available. A lot of confusion has been caused by having so many choices available, either the Pfizer, AstraZeneca or Moderna jabs, as well others provided by other countries. There are so many questions in our communities about which vaccine should be used and why they should have this one and not the other. Is one vaccine more effective than another? Should they mix the vaccines or not? We know of some patients that have had the Pfizer vaccine as a first dose but are now having trust issues on which one is more effective. The Oxford vaccine is always considered the more authentic according to many, but whether that is stemming from a nationalistic view is beside the point.
"Clearer communication was and is needed in that area so that communities understand why they cannot mix vaccines and how many inoculations they can have. The length of time inbetween the first and second dose also needs urgent clarity: should it be 28 days or longer? And does the gap actually matter?"
Despite the vaccination programme providing some clear hope of an end to the crisis, Muyenziwa was under no illusions that great uncertainty and anxiety continues to persist, especially among health workers, and the challenge for sector leaders now and in the longer-term following the pandemic will be to find new strategies to combat the psychological consequences.
Muyenziwa concluded: "It has been a time of uncertainty in both the business and social community sectors. The spectrums of psychological impact and turmoil were an anticipated aftermath of dealing with mental health issues that have been evoked or exacerbated by the impact of the virus. As the rug has been pulled beneath the feet of so many, I totally concur with the views of many that our communities require clear and defined territories reinstated through therapy interventions, for these are necessary to generate and boost self-awareness and are essential for the promotion of self-esteem, psychological balance and well-being.
"Our communities do require psychological interventions so that they can start healing and really process everything that has occurred during these most testing times. Alcohol uptake is on the high among health professionals and within communities and these issues need to be addressed so that we help those who have been working tirelessly in such trying times."
Photo by Josh Appel on Unsplash
