Stop quibbling over figures Leo and admit you should’ve done more for nursing heroes
IT’S funny how the summer makes you forget what went before. A few weeks ago we were applauding our health heroes on our doorsteps and thanking them for the hard work they were doing to try and save the lives of those we loved who were in hospital – for whatever reason – during this Covid-19 pandemic.
They were the people who held hands and comforted those who were sick; they were the people who made sure those who were about to breathe their last were not alone during their final moments.
They were the young doctors and nurses, some of whom boarded flights from all across the world, leaving behind their new lives to return home, out of a patriotic sense of duty to the country that trained them.
And in the last hours of winter and depths of spring, these were the people who were offering the nation hope, promising that if we too ended up in hospital, they would look after us.
Now, it would seem that despite those rounds of applause and rainbows in the windows, nobody was looking after them.
The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation general secretary Phil Ní Sheaghdha told the Special Covid-19 committee this week that Ireland had the highest rate of infection of healthcare workers in the world.
Frontline
As of yesterday 8,177 healthcare workers have contracted Covid-19 here. As of May 8, Ms Ní Sheaghdha said, 2,591 nurses, 2,056 healthcare assistants, 1,878 other allied health workers, 483 doctors and 90 porters had contracted the virus, many of whom are still suffering aftereffects.
At the beginning of this pandemic, there was a PPE shortage – not just here in Ireland but worldwide.
It was a matter of grave concern for those working in the health service who were bravely doing their jobs as, all the while, the added shadow of contracting the virus loomed large in their own lives?
What if they got ill? What about their families? If they contracted the virus, would they give it to their fathers, mothers, children, siblings, grandparents who lived with them? Would they die? Would their relatives die too?
While the rest of us were baking banana bread and moaning about working from home, thousands of healthcare workers contracted this hideous virus and seven of those died.
Of these cases, 88% contracted the virus in their workplace while caring for others.
So it is shocking to note that masks weren’t mandatory for healthcare workers until April 22, despite the pleas of those on the frontline to HSE bosses.
That’s more than a month after Leo Varadkar announced the lockdown for the rest of us. More than a month after the schools were closed down.
So it would appear that, due to the PPE shortage, mask wearing was not mandatory and even frowned upon by the HSE – Ms Ní Sheaghdha recounted a tale where one nurse was sent home for insisting that she be allowed to wear her mask while bosses told her she could not.
While it is now compulsory to wear masks on public transport, to fashion our own from socks and bedclothes if we can’t pick any up, it appears the HSE and the Government sent workers into the healthcare environments mask-free simply because it suited them to do so at that time.
Healthcare workers were clocking in without PPE, but living with the anxiety that they could get the virus and, worse still, pass it on to someone they loved. So many of them took the decision to separate from their families for that time.
And it’s no surprise that our nurses and care assistants are the healthcare workers with the highest number of casualties, the ones who are paid less than doctors, the ones who couldn’t afford to buy their own PPE and kit themselves out if it wasn’t readily available for them in the workplace: the ones who have to get the bus to work, the ones who spend the most time with the people you loved when they were dying in a nursing home or on a hospital ward.
Though Britain’s response to the Covid-19 crisis has been much maligned compared to what happened here, they did one thing right and that was to ensure those working in the health service had childcare.
Our nurses and healthcare workers are still struggling with this element of the pandemic too, as throughout this time they have been working while relying on family members to take care of their children, taking annual leave, working through the night so they could deal with homeschooling during the day.
Meanwhile, many of those who came home to Ireland to work in the health service, to answer the call, found themselves surplus to requirements.
Of the 73,000 volunteers who offered their services to help tackle the coronavirus crisis, only 7,000 were interviewed and, at the beginning of this month, only 140 had started work.
The rest who made it back to Ireland have joined the ranks of our unemployed, and they are not even eligible for the Covid-19 payment because they had been abroad. And yet, despite the INMO’s powerful revelations, the Government is cribbing and crying about the figures.
Ms Ní Sheaghdha said 4,823 healthcare workers remain out sick – more than half of those who were diagnosed. The Government says this figure is inaccurate and that 93% of those diagnosed have now recovered.
This seems disingenuous given the reported and well-documented after-effects of Covid-19 for some – the breathlessness, the fatigue, the brain fog which can linger long after the virus has supposedly left.
Protection
And, of course, there is the mental health toll too. After all, how would you feel going back to work in a place where you caught something that could potentially kill you, when it took over a month for your employer to give you the right advice?
Leo Varadkar also disputed Ms Ní Sheaghdha’s claim that we have the worst record for Covid-19 infections in the world amongst healthcare workers.
But even he was forced to acknowledge the numbers who were infected, and the fact that they were infected doing the job we needed them to do, that the Government was asking them to do, the job that undoubtedly saved lives.
‘So we need to make sure that they’re properly protected,’ he said, after acknowledging those 8,000-plus. This is, of course, too little too late. And the worst thing is that as a doctor, Leo Varadkar knows this well. He knows the situations workers will have found themselves in and he knows the time to take action and properly protect our health workers was back in March when he called for us all to stay at home. And those of us who could do that, well, of course, we were the lucky ones.
As for our healthcare frontline workers, Phil Ní Sheaghdha was right when she said they have been applauded and they have been abandoned. And all the pictures of rainbows in the world aren’t going to make up for that.