Nursing in pandemic ‘was a baptism of fire’
“A few weeks into my time, the second wave happened.”
When Sarah Hepworth-dodds decided to change careers and train as nurse in her late-30s, she had no idea that she’d start her first job as a nurse in the middle of a global pandemic.
But, despite the “extremely emotional” experience, the Geordie woman has channelled “all that stress” into a new book charting her experiences on the front line in a north London hospital.
Though she’s now moved back north, Sarah’s kept tight-lipped about which hospital it was, but she has spoken out about the “absolutely exhausting” fight to keep Covid at bay.
Before deciding to train as a nurse in Newcastle in 2016, Sarah lived and worked in Australia and then took time off to look after her children, who were then teenagers.
And then: “I finished my final year and got my first nursing job down in London, that was as the pandemic was beginning. We were needed on a high-dependency unit – and I spent nine months down there doing that. That nine months was a baptism of fire. I was starting at a new trust, hundreds of miles away from friends and family and looking after Covid patients.”
The book, called What a Year to Qualify, sees Sarah – who was brought up in Fenham and now lives in Kingston Park – document her early days on the wards. She explained that it’s not just about the trauma of the pandemic, but also features “the process of building trust with patients and with staff”.
She added: “There are some funny bits, there’s a lot more than just healthcare.
It’s also about the patient experience.
For example, there was a guy who came down from intensive care. He wanted us to shave his head. So I began, but suddenly there was a 5cm square left on his head and no batteries left...”
But, of course, the stresses and strains of Covid-19 are front and centre as Sarah remembers how difficult nursing was throughout 2020.
She said: “It was absolutely exhausting. I can just remember the emotions we all felt doing that every day. It was such an emotional experience to go through, but it was something you’d keep to yourself.”
Sarah said that though initially she’d talk about how difficult things were with her parents or husband Steven, she often noticed they themselves were beginning to struggle with stress about her too.
But she said that her family – including Steven and kids Mark and Emily – were “her own little cheering squad” throughout the pandemic and beyond.
Sarah, who’s now back in her home city working for the Newcastle Hospitals Trust and leading work to demystify menopause, said she had been inspired to write after telling stories as “light relief” to friends and colleagues, and said she wanted to share tales emphasising the spirit NHS staff showed during the pandemic.
“It’s about the pressures experienced by NHS staff on the front line but it’s also about the care and companionship that we provided to staff and poorly patients going through such a traumatic time.
“Much of the pressures were around staffing – we were so, so short-staffed. We had staff contracting Covid-19, We had such stress around bed space, we were having to make decisions about which patients could be on CPAP machines, it was traumatic.”