Calls for change should be too loud to hear – but those on the frontline know too well that lessons can go unheeded.spoke to Metro
He also intersperses his account with parallel moments from his work on London’s NHS maternity wards during Covid. The coronavirus pandemic may have taken place six years after the Ebola epidemic, but according to Dr Black, lessons went unlearnt. The epidemic was out of control. Every day, we were receiving more patients. They were arriving from increasingly far away, meaning longer journeys squeezed in the back of ambulances, bouncing along those terrible roads. By the time the ambulances arrived, we would find patients who had died en route, and patients lying, dazed, next to them, disorientated and dehydrated.
On instruction, and quite sensibly, we would not touch anything from the ambulance. The referral papers for patients coming from other hospitals would be held only in gloves and read out to someone else to copy the information down. The driver, their ambulance and all that was in it represented an Ebola twilight zone. They were neither infected nor free of the risk of onwards transmission, and yet they were fundamental to the fight.
Death became so familiar it was a passing comment, a matter of fact. ‘Thirty-one, thirty-five and forty are dead; we’ll need one child and two adult body bags.’ I am chilled to think how those words rolled so easily off my tongue. It was just work. We had to get the dead out to get more living in, and so the wheel turned.
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