‘THERE WERE TEARS . . . IT’S BEEN HARD’
Senior nurse on life on the frontline
A SENIOR nurse has described how she has to desperately cling on to hope after seeing how coronavirus has broken staff.
Meryl Jenkins, a senior nurse who manages a team of around 170 staff at four main hospitals run by the Hywel Dda University Health Board in West Wales, broke down in tears as she explained the pressure her colleagues are under during a BBC interview.
Describing what it is like on the frontline of an Intensive Care Unit, Meryl told BBC 5Live: “It is heartbreaking, mentally and physically draining.
“What we have experienced over the first wave, and definitely the second wave, is that we have to be that link with the families and relatives.
“It is extremely difficult trying to link with families over Facetime to show their relative on a ventilators.
“It is very hard for us to support. It is really, really difficult. My team have struggled daily, to be honest.
“Over the weekend I was on call and there were nurses in tears, there were doctors in tears, it’s just been hard.”
Asked about how she copes, Meryl broke down, saying: “You do take a lot on and you do . . . sorry I don’t mean to get emotional . . . you listen to them. You listen to your staff and you try and tell them it will be OK, but it won’t, you know, and that’s hard.
“It’s difficult to recruit into intensive care anyway because it is not an environment that suits everybody, you do need a high level of resilience and over the last few weeks, months, my staff have been tested, they have been put under extreme pressures.
“Normally we are one nurse to one patient, but in the peak we were one nurse to two to three patients, and knowing we cannot provide that high level of care that we would normally do has broken staff.
“Some that have come up to retiring have gone, already left, and a lot are in the process of leaving. And it’s difficult to recruit back in because we are not out of the second wave yet and I don’t know how much my team will be able to take before they decide to leave. It is difficult.”
Despite everything that is going on during the second wave, Meryl says that she still holds on to hope.
“You’ve got to keep hope, I’ve always clung on to that as an intensive care nurse.
“Never lose hope that there will be an end. The vaccine is being rolled out and you have to pray that people will bear with us that little bit longer.
“We have to have hope otherwise it would make our job impossible.”
Chief executive of NHS Wales, Andrew Goodall, did give some hope to his staff as he said there were encouraging signs that coronavirus cases were coming down.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he said: “Our community prevalence rates are down, they are down very significantly from where we were in December. We see the positivity rates and the reproduction values are well down within Wales now.
“Just over the last two or three weeks or so the number of patients in hospitals for coronavirus has actually reduced by about a quarter.”
But he warned there were still more than 2,000 patients in hospitals for Covid-19 treatment, which may “take some time to reduce to what we would say would be even close to normal levels”.
Carmarthenshire’s coronavirus level, for a sevenday rolling average between February 4 and 10 is 74.7, on December 20 the rate was 740.
Hywel Dda UHB has also met the first Welsh Government vaccination milestone of offering a first dose to everyone in groups 1 to 4 by February 15.
By Monday 101,938 vaccines had been administered – that’s 92% of local people in the first four priority groups. With many GP practices and the health board’s mass vaccination centres working hard over the weekend it is likely that there is still more data yet to be added.
Steve Moore, chief executive of Hywel Dda UHB, said: “We hope to see this high uptake continue as we move to vaccinate groups 5 to 9 by spring and to the rest of our adult population through the summer. Thank you.”