Meet some the driving
Today marks the first anniversary of the first patient with Covid admitted to Leicester’s hospitals. Since then, thousands have followed over a grim year that none of us could ever have foreseen. But as well as treating all the poorly patients, other work
AYEAR ago today the first of thousands of patients to be treated for Covid in Leicester’s hospitals was admitted. Little was known about the virus at the time and research teams wasted no time recruiting patients to projects and trials that have since changed the way medics are treating people with Covid-19 all over the world.
It has been a mammoth team effort over the past 12 months as more than 200 nurses, midwives, allied health professionals and support staff have joined together to carry out Covid-19 research in clinics, wards and intensive care units across the trust’s three hospitals – Leicester Royal Infirmary, Leicester General Hospital and Glenfield Hospital.
Together they have recruited and looked after more than 27,000 volunteers, patients and healthcare professionals in an attempt to better understand, prevent, manage and treat the disease that has claimed nearly 1,400 lives on city wards alone.
Rebecca is a thoracic research nurse.
She said: “There were days when I sat outside in my car not wanting to go in, when it was a hard day or week.
“But then you think about the patients and their families and realise that without them there would be no trials, and without the trials there’d be no treatments.”
One of the team’s biggest success stories was the Dexamethasone trial.
The steroid, thanks in part to research carried out at Leicester’s hospitals, was found to reduce deaths by up to a third among patients on ventilators, and by a fifth for those on oxygen.
Rebecca said: “When the Dexamethasone results came out... that was why we do it.
“Within two days it was being used on the wards and now it’s used all over the world.
“It was an amazing thing to have been part of.”
Leicester uses a “seek and search” model, which electronically tracks patients admitted with Covid-19 and assesses their suitability for the studies, before the team finds them on the wards.
The model has helped the trust become the UK’s highest recruiter to a massive national trial – RECOVERY – as well as gaining it other name-checks and references, including some at Downing Street daily briefings.
MICHELLE CRANER
Michelle, a respiratory research nurse, said: “Our role does mean that we were spending time on the wards, it was
BREAKTHROUGH: A box of Dexamethasone tablets. Results of a trial announced in June showed that Dexamethasone, a cheap and widely available steroid drug used to reduce inflammation, reduced death rates by around a third in the most severely ill Covid-19 patients who were admitted to hospital