PLEASE don't party or mix
Few talk about the NHS workers who have to cope with the infections caused by people partying or mixing. Here is an account of what it is like" It’s 5pm in a busy London hospital and a patient who came in a few days ago has deteriorated rapidly. The woman in her 60s has coronavirus. In a few days, she has gone from coping well to her oxygen levels dropping dramatically.This is a moment that replays in the mind of Ian (not his real name), a junior doctor who works in an infectious diseases unit in the capital. It stands out for a number of reasons: Ian had barely eaten that day, surviving an unrelenting shift on coffee, and his unit – which usually has 30 patients a day when things are busy – was full with 55 patients. The woman’s deterioration was unexpected and she was someone who would normally be fit and healthy, with years of life ahead of her.“I was stretched that day, working flat out … and I got a call from nurses saying the patient was unresponsive and needed 100% oxygen via a face mask, which is bad news usually,” Ian says.Another doctor got there first and it appeared the patient had had a stroke. “We needed to try to call her husband and children to tell them what had happened and communicate it,” he says, adding that these are people who never expected to get “that” call and in normal times it would not be happening. This was an otherwise perfectly healthy person.It’s been the hardest nine months of his career, he says, without any hesitancy in his voice. In the last few weeks in particular there has been a “palpable” sense of coronavirus cases rising.“It happened really quickly with new patients coming in. We had three or four … and then all of a sudden a few weeks ago the numbers started increasing at a rapid rate. The week before Christmas the number of new people was increasing by 30% per day.”Speaking over the phone on his day off, Ian says he fears he is reaching burnout, describing his long 12-hour shift, which starts at about 9am and ends after 9pm. The day is made up of ward rounds and meetings, assessing who needs tests and scans, or who might need to be referred to intensive care.He says he has become less able to cope with “unexpected things happening”.NHS boss praises staff 'in the eye of the storm' as Covid cases surgeRead more“You start feeling like you become less empathetic and treat patients more as numbers than humans. You react to stresses in the rest of your life in a more adverse way and you often start to become hard to be around. Essentially, you don’t have the emotional reserve,” he adds, noting that it takes its toll on personal relationships.At a recent evening meeting, an emergency buzzer went off to signal a patient was having a cardiac arrest. The man died. After that day, Ian came home and burst into tears due to the “enormous pressure and stress” he was feeling."
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