‘Now helpers need help’ – consultant’s emotional Covid letter
AN INTENSIVE care consultant who penned a beautiful letter to older people reassuring them that they have not been forgotten about in the fight against coronavirus, has written a second for NHS colleagues.
Last year, as the pandemic took hold, Dr Matt Morgan wrote a letter to those most at risk of harm from Covid, promising him and his colleagues would do everything they could to help.
“We will be honest,” he said. “We will hold your hand, we will be there.”
Now, in a follow up letter that he read on BBC Radio 4 yesterday, he said it is to “turn the hands that were used to clap, into hands held out to help pull us all back to our feet”.
He dedicated the letter to “those who care for others”, and repeats the line, “you may be cracked, but not broken” and reminds them there are families who will have a mum, a dad, a brother, a sister, a son, a daughter, a friend, at the table this Christmas because of them.
Dr Morgan, who is an honorary senior research fellow at Cardiff University and a consultant in intensive care medicine, research and development at the University Hospital of Wales, does not shy away from the reality of how dealing with the coronavirus pandemic has affected his colleagues.
Dr Morgan said: “Now the helpers need help. My words cannot describe what you have been through. Much loss, many hands held, bad news broken. The scaffold smiles hiding tears that you bring home at the end of another long day. Many of you may describe yourself, your teams, your systems as broken. Perhaps there is a way back.”
And he appealed to those who can help repair them – the public, the politicians, the media – ending on a powerful when he said: “You have the power to choose the future. Many are in a hurry to return to normal. But let’s be in a hurry to remember which parts of normal are worth returning to.”
Wales’ Health Minister Eluned Morgan has said: “The NHS is under huge pressure at the moment from the combination of winter illnesses, Covid, emergency demands and trying to catch-up with all the operations postponed during earlier waves of the pandemic.
“Our NHS and care workforce is doing an incredible job but they are exhausted – they’ve worked flat out and have done everything we have asked of them.”