An ICU health-care worker shown inside a negative pressure room cares for a COVID-19 patient on a ventilator at the Humber River Hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic in Toronto on Wednesday, December 9, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan DenetteLast summer, when England's first peak of the coronavirus pandemic had subsided, Fazilah, an ICU nurse at a central London hospital, sat down to write her resignation letter.
Fazilah ultimately decided to stay at her job, but some of her colleagues did not, "simply due to what they have seen." In the first few months of the pandemic, intensive care unit nurses working for the U.K.'s National Health Service were stretched thin as they trained staff, converted wards into ICUs and, crucially, were forced to expand the "safe" NHS recommended nurse to patient ratio of 1:1 to 1:2, due to the sheer number of admissions.
"When you have one nurse to one patient, you can give excellent care," said one veteran ICU worker, who asked to remain anonymous. Ameera Sheikh, an ICU nurse and Unite union representative at a London hospital, told CNN that instead of one patient -- or even two -- she and her colleagues are now each looking after up to eight patients at a time.
A spokesperson for the NHS in London told CNN in a statement that: "The NHS has well-established plans in place to cope with additional demand and maintain patient safety." The statement added that: "Nursing staff ratios can be flexed to cope with pressure as appropriate and where it is safe to do so."
In October, the government said that there were nearly 14,000 more nurses working in the NHS than the previous year. The Chair of the British Association of Critical Care Nurses refuted that number, saying that that there was "no evidence" of those nurses in the NHS.Some have moved out of their homes to be closer to hospitals in order to work more shifts -- and to protect their families, Sheikh explained, adding that even on off days, it's almost impossible to switch off.
"What is difficult about this [situation] is trying to manage it all at once," the nurse said. They said that this horrifying scenario is often unfolding for multiple patients at the same time, across hospital wards that are not set up for critical care, as the ICUs are already at full capacity. Last month, the Health Service Journal reported that ICU units in London were already running at 114 per cent occupancy, forcing them to stretch capacity, and that requests had been made by hospitals there to send critical care patients to hospitals in Yorkshire, more than 200 miles to the north. Stevens confirmed on Sunday that a "small number" of patients had been transferred from one region to another.
Very sad for those wonderful dedicated members of the medical profession, I can't personally imagine how you cope with it.😞
'staff in the UK have reported symptoms of PTSD, anxiety or depression and feeling they would be better off dead. For some nurses, having to help families say goodbye to their relatives remotely, since they're unable to do so in person, has contributed to that trauma.' 😰
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