Hospital boss admits Covid-19 crisis ‘is truly scary at times’

Trust chief executive praises incredible efforts of staff... Watch the full interview online at

The chief executive of Peterborough City Hospital has admitted tackling the coronavirus crisis has been “truly scary at times” as she praised staff for their incredible efforts during the pandemic. Caroline Walker acknowledged that the unprecedented challenge has been “intense,” “difficult,” “worrying” and “very sad,” but she said the hospital in Bretton had coped.

In an interview with former BBC Cambridgeshire presenter Paul Stainton she revealed the hospital’s ICU (Intensive Care Unit) had increased five-fold to tackle the crisis, but that an easing of Covid-19 patient numbers meant the extra capacity was now being scaled back.

She also revealed that staff had never been lacking in personal protective equipment (PPE), despite shortages nationally, while welcoming back non-Covid patients is also being progressed, albeit they will all need to be tested for the virus.

The chief executive of the North West Anglia NHS Foundation Trust - which runs Peterborough City, Hinchingbrooke and Stamford and Rutland hospitals - said: “Things are far from normal. We’ve been managing in full pandemic incident mode now - this is week seven - and getting to grips with everything this virus has to throw at us.

“It’s been intense, it’s been difficult, it’s been worrying and very sad at times, but we’ve coped and are getting used to the new world that we live in, in hospitals, and trying to gear up for what might be ahead of us in the next few months as well as thinking about the future.”

Ms Walker spoke movingly about the huge efforts which have been made by staff to respond to the crisis, with many having to change their roles at short notice.

And part of the challenge, she admitted, has been to focus on their wellbeing due to the large number of fatalities with the latest published figures showing at least 90 people who have tested positive for the virus have died at the hospital.

The chief executive said: “The staff have been amazing. I can’t fault any of the staff for anything that they’ve done. It’s been truly scary at times, for me as chief executive, for our staff.

“The vast majority of our staff have risen to the challenge in front of them. We are here to care for people no matter how much pressure that puts on us.

“We’ve tried our best to make sure our staff take their breaks, have time off, take all their rest days and try to take a bit of annual leave, but as we go into week seven lots of our staff are tired.

“We’ve got to figure out how we can maintain their health and wellbeing as well as care for the patients in this world of Covid and non-Covid patients for what appears to be something like many more weeks and months to come.

“(The mental health impact due to the number of deaths) is one of the longer term issues to think about. Some of our areas do have end of life patients, but the vast majority of our areas cure patients and send them home. More and more of our areas have had to deal with patients being end of life or having bereavements.

“Even in our intensive care department where we do sadly have deaths on a regular basis, the intensity and the number of deaths is taking its toll on everybody.

“We’ve had so many staff affected by the illness or sent home to shield or isolate so we’ve had a lot of staff absence. So we have asked staff to work in different areas to what they normally work in, and that’s put a strain on people as well.

“Staff have been incredibly brilliant at moving and taking on new roles and being redeployed where the peaks of activity have needed them. And I’m thankful that they’ve done that.”

The trust has run a ‘leadership control room’ 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for the past seven weeks.

And one area which has troubled senior leaders has been PPE, although thankfully there has always been enough equipment to go around, Ms Walker said.

She added: “There have been issues on supply on various days, but all of our staff

A light was shone on the work being carried out by nurses in Peterborough and across the world on International Nurses Day. The Cavell Centre was lit up blue on Tuesday night, as the 200th anniversary of the birth of Florence Nightingale was celebrated. Staff from the Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust who work at the Cavell Centre were among those to mark the occasion. Florence was known as ‘the lady with the lamp,’ as she carried out her rounds tending to wounded soldiers during the Crimean War. Emergency hospitals set up to treat COVID-19 patients in the UK were named after her.

have had all of the amount of equipment that they needed to care for all of the patients all of the time.

“I just think our supplies team and our corporate team have had various levels of worry on a daily basis. We’ve counted the stock levels in the warehouse and had the supplies department wondering if we will get through the next three or four days or whether it will just be two days.

“One of the unsung heroes of this has been our supplies manager who managed to get bits of equipment and the right PPE to the right places when we’ve needed it.”

She revealed more nonCovid 19 patients will soon be able to visit Peterborough City Hospital due to the peak of the pandemic having passed.

She said patients who were not urgent before the lockdown, but are now, will be brought in, albeit they will need to be tested for the virus.

Outlining the current situation at the hospital, and how it might tackle a second wave of Covid-19, she said: “One thing we’ve tested ourselves in the first phase is our ability to surge, and one thing that particularly impressed me was our ability to find out how we quickly tripled the size of our intensive care department overnight.

“We have stepped that back down now and our Covid intensive care capacity is three times as big as normal, but it’s not five times as big as normal, and we’ve ready to step back up again if we need to, but currently the peak levels we’re at are showing a slight reduction.

“We are gradually over the next period post-lockdown going to start bringing more cancer patients in and more

patients that are urgent now that weren’t urgent seven weeks ago. And as we do that we need to do that carefully, understanding that the infection rates might increase again in the society, in the population, putting pressure on the health service.

“One thing that’s been great here in Peterborough is we started off in week one having to send off all our tests and our swabs for infection down to the lab at Addenbrooke’s in Cambridge. And we quickly got our labs here in Peterborough geared up for the particular test for Covid.

“Once we were testing on site in our own hospital that meant we were getting our results within a day so we could actually move our patients around. With hindsight I wish we were doing that from day one so I could have known very quickly which patients had Covid and which patients didn’t and that would have reduced worry levels because everybody who comes through the front door we’ve been treating as possibly having the infection.”

The trust, which also runs Hinchingbrooke Hospital and Stamford and Rutland Hospital, has so far seen at least 143 patients who have tested positive

for the coronavirus die, however, more than 300 have been discharged after recovering from the virus.

And asked if the city hospital will soon be back to normal now that the peak has been passed and lockdown restrictions are being eased, Ms Walker replied: “Not for a while, but my hope is that we get back to a normal where we can identify quickly the patients that have got exposure to this disease and the patients that haven’t, and that we can quickly understand the level of infection in the population so we can bring patients safely to the hospital.

“So for a while the normal will mean we will have to test every patient who comes to the hospital. We will gradually know whether those patients have the infection or have had it or are immune, but we don’t have that information yet.

“So for a while we are going to be bringing patients to the hospital for elective treatments and less urgent treatments, but we’re going to have to test them before they come into the hospital.”

The chief executive also revealed that video and phone consultations with non-Covid patients have been going ahead during the pandemic,

‘It’s been intense and very sad at times, but we’ve coped’ Caroline Walker