Nurses ‘having to act as families to their patients’
NURSES are facing the challenge of acting as families to their patients who are dying, according to an emergency room nurse.
Patricia Treacy, a clinical nurse manager in St Luke’s Kilkenny, who worked through the London bombings in 2005, said building trust with families going through not being able to be with their dying relative is a challenge that wasn’t there for medical staff before the virus.
Speaking to the Irish Mail on Sunday, Ms Treacy who has been a nurse for 24 years, said: ‘The challenge of someone dying in A&E at the moment, irrespective of whether they’re Covid or not, those challenges are completely different to the way they were five weeks ago. We’re now having to be that person’s family and reassure their family that we are there for that person. We want to build up trust so that they know their loved one is being dealt with in the best way possible by the most fantastic people who are skilled. It’s so difficult for families.’
She added it was incredible to see staff rising to the new daily challenges. She said: ‘We’re dealing with emergencies all the time. Our workload is always unpredictable, we’re always in an intense environment. We’re trained for that unpredictability.
‘An awful lot of nurses are being redeployed from other areas, so the biggest change is imparting a sense of calm to those who wouldn’t be used to working in the department.
‘The trolley waits have gone, we don’t have the volume of people coming that we’re used to. We’ve divided patients who are coming in connected to Covid and non-Covid.
‘It’s teamwork at its best the last few weeks. We’ve moved our coronary care to make it an intensive care unit. We’ve doubled the capacity of our intensive care unit by doing that.
‘Our medical assessment unit has turned into our Covid assessment unit. The way we’ve changed our streaming of patients has changed dramatically but it really works.’
While anxiety is high, Ms Treacy said that staff were getting through this with a ‘can-do attitude’. She added: ‘This will be the time we look back and think, “do you remember that year of 2020?” It’ll change the way things are.’