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WITH 1,949 people in hospital with Covid-19 and more than 200 in our ICUs, hospitals and their staff are again under immense pressure.
Bernie Waterhouse, Clinical Nurse Manager at St James’ Hospital in Dublin, said 2020 was the “most challenging year of my career” and she and her colleagues are now battling another surge that is growing every day.
She has been working on a Covid ward for the last ten months, having been redeployed from the surgical area of the hospital.
Waterhouse was the first healthcare worker to be vaccinated and has now received both doses of the Pfizer vaccine.
Speaking at today’s HSE briefing, she said one of the most upsetting aspects of the first surge last year was that the hospital could not allow visitors in to spend time with dying relatives.
At that stage, she said, it was not clear how much protection PPE would provide and there were concerns that family members could catch Covid-19 if they spent time in the hospital.
“It was a really difficult and stressful situation. A lot of patients as a result, died on their own,” she said.
In the first phase particularly, nurses were the last people to see the patients before they died. Unfortunately they couldn’t always be with them because of the lack of PPE and the question of whether it was protecting staff, we had to reduce staff exposure to 15 minutes. It was really difficult and a lot of the time patients did die on their own.
“We did a lot of Whatsapp calls and Zoom calls with relatives before they died, but also unfortunately we had to do it after. A lot of patients’ families would ask us to send photographs after they had died because they wouldn’t see them.
We would get families to bring in clothes so that we could dress them in their clothes before we sent them off to the mortuary. All of these patients unfortunately had to go into a body bag which isn’t really very nice at all.
In this phase families can visit for short periods of time to be with their relatives when they are dying. She said the hospital has also improved its communication with families, contacting them daily to provide updates and arranging video calls with patients.
“We’ve also secured a Spotify account for dying patients who can play their music when their families aren’t there,” she said.
‘Hugely stressful’
On Christmas week, the hospital had just six Covid patients. Now there are 102 patients with Covid-19 in the hospital, with 22 of them in ICU.
“We’ve had days that have been hugely stressful for our staff, where we’ve had maybe a couple of deaths and also a couple of patients that have gone to ICU on the same day,” Waterhouse said.
“So that’s really difficult to manage and unfortunately sometimes care has been omitted because you just physically can’t provide the care that’s needed for these patients, a lot of these patients required one-to-one nursing care, which we can’t provide.”
While the hospital is dealing with increased pressure on its resources, it is also faced with staff shortages as healthcare workers contract the virus. Waterhouse said some staff have been out for the majority of the pandemic due to longterm effects of Covid-19.
She said even staff in their 20s and 30s are still suffering from the effects months later and are unable to return to work.
Waterhouse said the is anxiety among staff working in Covid areas as they have been isolated from their home life, with limited social contacts for the entire pandemic.
“Particularly on a Covid ward they’re always concerned about whether they’ll transmit the virus if they’re asymptomatic carriers to vulnerable relatives.,” she said.
We’ve had some nurses living with their parents but unable to meet in the house because their parents might be concerned about them transmitting the virus. They feel very isolated as a result of that and this has gone on for a number of months because they’re working in a Covid area.
Waterhouse said the last year has been a huge learning curve and nursing teams have “adapted greatly to a hugely changing environment.”
“They’re very committed to their work and we’re very proud of them. We’ve learned a huge amount from this pandemic, it’s the most I’ve ever learned in my whole career in the last year.”
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Thank you nurses, and a bigger thanks to any student nurses in the covid icu’s
@RJ: doctors?
@Ciaran bolger: It seems to be in vogue these days not to appreciate doctors. Nurses have a maximum amount they work a week, while for a doctor it’s unlimited. Many back to back full 24 hour shifts. 12 and 19 days in a row of work is not out of place.
Have been living a nightmare for weeks, my brothers wife is in ICU and is fighting for her life. Each day is unbearable, she’s early 40′s with three small children, progressively declined to the extend that her lungs are destroyed. I have walked her mother to the ICU ward door everyday this week so she can spend some time with her daughter, knowing as she leaves each visit could be her last. My brother and his kids are heartbroken, their lives have been destroyed. The agony and anguish is unbearable, it could have been different, she was so cautious, but because people in our community felt they had to have a party, and subsequently carried on with their lives despite having symptoms and created a super spreading event in our community.
10 mins in the wrong place with the wrong person is going to take her life, destroy her family, alter their lives forever. There are no words.
@Stephen: Oh god, that’s awful. I really hope she pulls through this, absolutely tragic. My cousin & his wife (they married in hospital, they were that unwell) were in a very dire place a few weeks ago & it was not looking good at for them whatsoever. But they have got progressively better better to the point they are off ventilators & are recovering. I hope their story gives you a little hope that, that too, can happen with your sister in law. I wish her a speedy recovery.
@Stephen: Thank you for sharing that with us. I cant even imagine what it must be like
@Stephen: this is terrible Stephen. People just don’t understand how bad this virus is . This shouldn’t have happened to your sister in law or family . The very best wishes and hopefully this lady will pull through and have many happy days ahead with her family
@Kevin O’Brien: Thank you, it does help to hear your story.
According to the OECD we have one of the lowest ratios of ICU beds per capita in Europe, which also doesn’t help the situation.
@Jules: And had a year to sort that out but our government rolled the dice assuming they wouldn’t be needed, o how wrong a gamble that was.
@Jason Walsh: can’t be done in a year. Every ICU bed requires 6 highly trained medical staff in service. Not possible to train that amount of people even in that time. You could easily provide the beds but not the personnel. The damage to our ICU was there long before Covid.
@Jules: Thats mad about the beds …. and apparently the HSE runs one of the best health care systems in the world!!. The world health organisation ranks us 18th in the whole world, thats amazing, but hey we’re Irish so its a national sport to run things down. The much talked about UK national health service is ranked 17th.
@Fergal Doyle: All the evidence out there and you are still in denial Fergal?
We should be number one in the world due to our small population, excellent education and the amount of money that is allocated to our health care service. Sadly due to poor leadership and management skills, we will never see improvements.
@Gerard Smith: if there was a will there would be a way
And still people wont listen & stay at home & adhere to restructions. No fixing the thicks!
Long winded way of saying we are in trouble if the current trend in hospitalizations continues.
@Joe_X: Sobering read. Shouldn’t we be expecting hospitalization numbers to come down with the case numbers soon? I cant get my head around that.
@Vonvonic: I would hope so, but it will probably be another week or so before we start seeing a decline those numbers. The fact that they were adding backlogged numbers last couple weeks has muddied the waters, so we cannot compare new cases then to hospitalizations now.
@Joe_X: Yeah. We should start seeing alot of people being released from hospital soon too. I could be wrong but I think if we can get our numbers under 1500 or so we should start to see it decline then.
@Vonvonic: not at 2000+ cases a day….about 5% end up in hospital and 0.5% in ICU…. hospital numbers will keep.going up.
@Cosmos20202020: So that’s 100 cases. Shouldn’t we be having releases in excess of that pretty soon though?. What’s the average amount of time spent in hospital?
@Vonvonic: Well how long does it take from when someone gets infected to a point where they are leaving icu? I think 5 days before they gets symptoms is common, few days later they could end up in hospital. Few days after that in icu and then god knows how long before they recover because every case is different but overall it takes long time. By that logic I’d expect 2 weeks anyway before we see the icu situation improving after the daily cases started to drop. I’m no expert but that seems to be the case and is why they are expecting it to get worse this week anyway before they start seeing light.
@Vonvonic: If you are very sick with covid, then you could be in hospital for months, not just two weeks like the asymptomatic cases. The rate of newhospitalisations may drop but we could still run out of capacity because those in icu may be there for a long time.
Stay at home, simple.
Definitely not nice reading, so we are nearly at breaking point.
@Paul Somers: They could just as easily have written an article that hospital numbers are close to peaking and are expected to start falling shortly
Exactly, our beds per capita were very low to begin with. That’s why we’ve had to have yo-yo lockdowns. Other countries could handle more hospitalisations.
It means our health system is ducked up , who knew?
What is there to say, except both FG & FF are to blame for bed shortages. They have been in power for the last 100 years. Hospitals are not fit for purpose at the best of times, never mind during a pandemic. Nurses and doctors regularly at breaking point before the current situation.
@3isamagicnumber: you can’t just put ICU beds in at the drop of a hat. Like someone said above its not about the beds it’s about the personnel to look after the people in those beds. And it doesn’t help that so many nurses and doctors have now had to stop working becausse they have the virus.
@Sam Harms: It’s not today nor yesterday we knew we were under manned and under resourced in our hospitals it’s been flagged for a long time.Far too much money for fluff plum managerial positions and not nearly enough at the pointy end. HSE is like an upside down pyramid when it comes to where the money goes
Just reading that is certainly an eye opener! Please stay safe and follow guidelines or this could happen to you or someone you know and love
Reading this is certainly an eye opener! Please follow the guidelines or you could or someone you love could end up in this situation which is terrifying
It means the beacon should be cpo’d since as we are in a national health emergency
Fergal O’Hagan Essential worker…can’t stay at home
THE WOULD RATHER PUT ALL THE MONEY INTO STATE OF THE ART CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL, THAN SAVE PEOPLE’S LIVES.
Main stream media can spin this anyway they want. They can blame the young, the stupid, and the anti vaccine brigade. But the simple fact is the consistent inaction by governments to address the issues in public healthcare means our system has no surge capacity and has not had for the last 20 years. A&Es bursting at the seams, people that should be being cared for in the community taking up acute beds, they want the whole thing privatised the beef baron doesn’t only own meat processing plants he has a big paw in private healthcare as well. Our corrupt politicos will find a way to funnel the cash to their cronies and they don’t care who dies in the process.
@Vonvonic: The average hospital stay is 18 days I think. Around day 12-16 of infection is when most end up needing hospitalization. The average ICU stay is around 21 days.
Imagine if in 2019 the government had asked everyone to spend the whole winter at home, closed all bars, restaurants and venues, because we had 10,000 people on trolleys in hospitals? That’s compared to a total official hospital capacity of 14,000 beds.
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