Alarming look inside hospital on brink
NURSES’ eyes red with exhaustion and staff choking back tears, these are the shocking scenes inside a hospital on the brink.
Staff at London’s University College Hospital said colleagues are ‘broken’ and can only continue at this rate ‘for about a week’.
In the alarming look inside the intensive care unit broadcast on the BBC last night, consultant Dr Alice Carter said she often found nurses crying when she arrived at work.
She added: ‘The physical and mental load is huge and I’m really worried that we’re going to break a lot of nurses and doctors.’
Ashleigh Shillingford, Deputy Sister at the hospital, said: ‘We’re so stretched we have to prioritise care, which is not the NHS I grew up in. We shouldn’t have to choose which patient gets what care first.
‘Patients are losing their lives at a dramatic speed. We’re not just getting old people, there are young people that we’re also getting.’
Staff at University College Hospital are now more stretched than at the peak of the first wave in April.
Consultant Dr Jim Down added that if Covid cases continued to rise they ‘physically couldn’t look after critically ill patients’. They are also treating three pregnant women who are in intensive care with Covid. Rachel Arfin, who is due to give birth in five weeks, said staff had been caring for her and her baby so well ‘because they’re looking after two people in one’. Another patient, Atilla Karayel, 67, said: ‘It got really bad. I couldn’t breathe at all. It knocked me out and I didn’t think I’d make it through. ’ Gerald Williams, who had been waiting for lung cancer treatment when he caught Covid, said he was just pleased he was still alive.