Medical experience from Otago aids battle in UK
A FORMER Dunedin respiratory physician who produced a booklet to help medical staff, patients and their families cope with crises is facing uncertainty himself.
Robin Taylor lived in Dunedin for 25 years and was professor of medicine at the University of Otago before he left for Edinburgh in 2013. He is now part of a team that oversees Covid19 wards in a hospital near Glasgow.
Prof Taylor (66) had so far been ‘‘shielded’’ from frontline duties because his age put him at greater risk, but he was conscious that he would need to step in if colleagues became ill.
That thought had brought his own material closer to home.
Critical illness and uncertainty were themes of the booklet and, in it, Prof Taylor had strived to reduce the pressure associated with difficult conversations and to promote planning that should lead to the best patient care achievable when death might be near.
He produced a New Zealand version this year and he said 400 copies were recently delivered to Dunedin Hospital.
Southern District Health Board medical director Hywel Lloyd said the board was grateful to Prof Taylor for sharing his work and making the booklet available to clinicians.
‘‘We appreciate it was written for a UK context but nevertheless it provides us with a valuable platform that we can build on.’’
In Scotland, NHS Lanarkshire — similar to a district health board — had just bought 22,000.
The United Kingdom has had more than 26,000 deaths from Covid19.
‘‘The situation in resthomes is dire,’’ Prof Taylor said.
Testing had been inadequate and access to personal protective equipment was patchy but had improved recently.
Patients in Covid19 wards are highly infectious and, as a man aged between 60 and 70, Prof Taylor would have about a 15% chance of dying if he were to contract the disease.
He said his colleagues had been gracious and he was running outpatient clinics from home. He had sometimes been tense, anticipating a call to the Covid19 frontline.
‘‘I have a friend who is an emergency department consultant and he admits to being scared every time he goes to work, and that everyone in the ED is tense. He is a very experienced doctor.’’
Prof Taylor said hospitals in Scotland seemed to be coping with the pandemic.
Some developments had been unexpected.
‘‘The biggest surprise is that while most people have a minor illness, it can strike very hard in a small number of younger patients without previous medical conditions,’’ he said.
‘‘Once a cascade pathological reaction to the virus gets going, it is very difficult for that to be reversed.’’
Between 50% and 60% of patients who started mechanical ventilation in intensive care did not survive.
Prof Taylor said he had been happy working for the University of Otago and Dunedin Hospital but became restless in the two years before his departure.
He was offered a job in Scotland and described that as an answer to his prayers.