Surgeon happy to go back to junior roots
Consultant juggling different roles as hospital staff battle coronavirus cases
A PAEDIATRIC surgeon has found himself juggling junior doctor duties as medics pull together to fight Covid-19.
Ross Craigie usually spends his days operating at the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital, specialising in cancer patients.
But Mr Craigie has had to juggle his duties as a paediatric surgical consultant with some of the tasks he used to carry out as junior doctors are moved to the frontline to battle the virus.
Mr Craigie says the changes have afforded him the opportunity to interact more with patients.
“Every doctor has generic skills that can be used anywhere,” he explains.
“The surgical juniors are really good at intravenous access – so putting catheters in patients’ blood vessels and things like that. So they were taken away from us – quite rightly – to help with catheters for patients coming in with potential Covid.
“That workload that they fulfil at the moment – such as being the initial doctor who reviews the patients in the accident and emergency department, or putting cannulas in patients, or prescribing their drips, or prescribing paracetamol – they have been taken away, so as consultants you step up to fulfil that role.
“I haven’t done that for about tenand-a-half years. It was actually quite nice spending the time seeing patients and doing the job you used to do. And it felt nice to support the Trust in those stages of the pandemic.”
Mr Craigie would normally spend a couple of days a week in theatre, running clinics for patients requiring surgery and emergency operations and teaching junior doctors.
Though the emergency pattern has stayed the same, teaching is now done via video conferencing.
Meanwhile, managers are working out how the hospital will look as social distancing measures continue.
“We see hundreds of patients a day in clinic so how do you reach that now? It can be through video consultations and some face-toface meetings,” Mr Craigie says.
“We have children that come from Cumbria, Staffordshire, families who are travelling a significant distance. If we’re able to provide that safe service but by telephone that’s a huge advantage to those families not having to drive all the way to Manchester.”
In April senior medics warned families that they must attend hospital if children become unwell after a worrying drop in admission.
The number of children being taken to the A&E department was 52.9 per cent lower than predicted between April 10 and 17.
The figures are now creeping back up to normal levels and Mr Craigie has reiterated the message that the hospital is safe to attend.
“If families are worried they need to bring their children up to hospital,” he says.
“I can completely understand their anxieties about doing that but we have a duty to make the children’s hospital as safe as we can and we don’t want families sat at home worrying.”
For Mr Craigie, the most inspiring thing about working during the pandemic has been the reaction of families.
“The families of our patients have been very understanding and it’s been quite humbling that families have been asking if the staff are all safe and okay,” he says.
“That’s been really nice.”