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Nine months ago, Boris Johnson praised the staff at St Thomas for saving his life. Now, a senior intensive care nurse at the London hospital has warned that patient care is being compromised due to staff shortages and lack of planning for the second wave of Covid.
Dave Carr, a nurse in charge of intensive care, is one of many NHS workers who are desperate for the public to know what is happening inside their hospitals at a time when misinformation and skepticism about the virus abound. .
Outside of Santo Tomás, in the early hours of New Year’s Day, a crowd of Covid deniers gathered, without masks, yelling “Covid is a hoax”. Inside, Carr’s colleagues fought to save the lives of a growing number of patients.
“The public must be aware of what is happening. This is worse than the first wave; we have more patients than in the first wave and these patients are as sick as in the first wave. Obviously we have additional treatments that we can use now, but patients are still dying and will die, ”Carr said.
As a representative of the Unite union, Carr feels emboldened to speak up. But across the NHS, many more staff say they have been threatened with disciplinary action or even dismissal if they poke their heads above the parapet.
In Devon, a nurse working in a Covid ward said safety standards had slipped at her hospital, but she feared for her job if she was identified by name. “Infection control restrictions are more relaxed. Before, we had to use a separate entrance, but now we don’t, and some doctors feel they don’t have to obey infection control protocols and are still not sure how to remove their PPE correctly, ”he said.
Staffing is a big problem, he said, with 10 out of 25 nurses absent in a recent week because they were isolated. During the first wave, your hospital never had more than 20 Covid patients. They are now over 40.
Claims circulating on social media that hospitals were empty had upset many employees. “People need to understand the problems we have and the situations we face, rather than this ridiculous notion that we are all in empty hospitals learning TikTok dances, which couldn’t be further from the truth,” said one occupational therapist in Hampshire. . “They pressure us to pretend that everything is fine for the benefit of the popularity of the government. They are trying to minimize the situation so that people do not look behind the curtain and see what is happening. “
Carr, who has been an intensive care specialist for 21 years, said that as more lives were saved at St Thomas’, those patients have to stay in the hospital longer, which puts more pressure on hospitals, “because actually we can fix more patients than we could the first time. “
He warned that St Thomas’ was now treating patients from other hospitals in the area that were on the brink of collapse.
Carr’s hospital has increased intensive care capacity and now has nearly 100 beds, but is struggling to find nurses to care for them. He believes the dire situation could have been avoided if hospitals had delayed operations and non-urgent care in recent months to focus on training nurses, but “what we heard was that NHS England and the Department of Health simply put pressure on the hospital to do the same elective work possible and of course now we have to deliver the vaccine. “
Carr said the pandemic had come after “chronic cuts to the NHS for 10 years,” with tens of thousands of nursing positions vacant, and then the first wave had “ripped apart” staff.
“One of the things that is really not being understood… we are doing things now that compromise the care that we have been trying to provide and that I have provided throughout my career. And for many of our nurses, it is really annoying for them not to be able to provide the level of care that you have been trained for, ”she said.
The Hampshire occupational therapist said they were among the “vast majority of staff who felt frustrated and unable to put the word under my own name and say what was going on.”
Staffing was a major issue, they said: “We are losing staff by fists, either through illness or by being reassigned to other areas. We are opening up bed spaces anywhere we can find them and are being warned that we will need to use our already scarce therapy space to house patients, which means that rehabilitation will be seriously impaired.
“Paradoxically, the first wave felt well organized compared to this one: there was a government emergency plan and we followed it. This time around, the spike in numbers was initially bland, and now it feels like we’ve been caught up in something we could have easily prepared for. The days are exhausting, and then being confronted by Covid deniers on social media makes us emotionally haunted by the denial of our loved experiences. “
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