Hospital staff, tell us the reality

[Ihateme]

I’m am so fed up of seeing people comment on here that schools should be going back, that people should not be reporting mass gatherings in tier 4, how dare people begrudge a child their birthday party etc...

The hospitals are in a worse state now than they were during the first peak. Would any doctors or nurses care to confirm this? Maybe then these Mumsnetters will get the message.

DD’s mental health has spiralled this year.
The main flare ups have been when she knew she was due to go to college and also knew that her friends had been out socialising and carrying on as normal.
Lockdown was easier to deal with as our safety wasn’t so much in the hands of people in denial.

Such an important point Red. My DS has been sick with worry about bringing it home as I am ECV. I dread to think of what it is doing to his MH but even more to the MH of kids who do infect vulnerable family members. It's appalling that this is not considered as it will have lifelong consequences for them :(

I know enough how friends who work in schools have got so anxious about the risk they are being exposed to, they've struggled to sleep at night. One of them told me this morning she'd had 5 nights good sleep and how wonderful it was. Prior to Christmas she was being extra cautious because she couldn't stand the thought of ending up ill or in isolation before she'd had it (thats not having people in the house either - thats just keeping to rule of 6 and being able to do the Christmas shop).

Why are kids different to that? Are they immune to this level of anxiety from the uncertainity and yoyoing?

I was on edge for the whole of the last week of school. I doubt that I was alone, and its crazy to think that if parents are like this, even young kids aren't picking up on it. And for the most part I've been pretty relaxed about it since September compared to a lot of people even though I've been aware of the inevitability of where we would be by Christmas.

What I do find notable in threads is how much kids ARE projecting their own anxiety onto kids. This is natural and to be expected - we live in units which have a certain symbiosis. Its not something you can just hide.

The reality is that we know that some kids have isolated up to 6 times. In areas where the kids have been in school thats be preferable. In hard hit areas, the yoyo effect has to have had a negative effect to a lot of kids - far more than if they'd been at home. Not for all certainly.

But we have got into a blanket mentality that schools being kept open = kids actually in school constantly (not true) and that the majority of kids benefit from being in school regardless of how bad the number of cases in the community has got (highly debatable) and that keeping kids in school now means they lose less education (not true if schools drove infection rates in Kent, London and Essex to the degree it now looks, which has now forced the complete closure of schools - for an unknown period of time).

The lack of proper nuance here, is something that does need addressing. For everyone's sake, having a threshold which is public and known by everyone (including children) at which you know the schools will close / open would offer a certain degree of certainty which is much needed for mental health reasons.

From what I observed in September / October areas start to have real problems with schools staying open due to cases / staffing levels at around 400 cases per 100,000.

It would be interesting to correlate the known data on this tbh.

WiddlinDiddlin that is just an appalling way to have to be living. Thank you for saying the kind things about NHS staff despite what you are going through. I know of quite a number of other people who are suffering through illnesses with little support as the stretched NHS departments can not help them as they would normally try to do.

I'm very interested in what people are saying about kids mental health, which comes up again and again as though children are suffering more through not being able to go to school than they would be either being unwell or being afraid of being contagious to their parents / extended family. My daughter is 18 at college and yes, she's really sad not to be able to see her friends but she also follows the news and is very scared by what is happening. She's scared of getting ill (she has asthma as do I) and passing it on to me or my DH. She has understood that the greater worry is the virus, not her education or her social life. I mean is it just so awful being at home and a bit bored and lonely, compared to watching this awful pandemic go on and on and seeing the death toll rising? Can't we, as parents, help them to cope with the mental strain of this, seeing as we're all dealing with it too? I also miss my friends and family. I haven't seen anybody from my family since January last year as I'm in London and they are in the north. I do feel like I'm going a bit bonkers at times and it does make me sit and cry at times. But the option of ignoring it and actually making everything worse is the only option and I'm not going to take it.

RedToothBrush agree with you again.

@Daisysflowers

Everyone is entitled to their opinion. The main problem is how this has divided everyone.

People aren't entitled to opinions instead of facts.

@haggistramp

I dont understand the hospital shortages, aren't people being sent to the nightingale hospitals if they have covid, wasn't this the point of them. Are they even up and running? I heard a lot of hoo ha earlier in the year about the nightingale hospitals and then nothing more.

I work in ICU and we've been told that if we need to send patients to nightingales then we need to send staff too. We're already short staffed so we just can't.

I'm cynical but honestly I think the nightingale hospitals were just a bloody PR stunt. The gov were all "we build a while hospital in just 9 days, look how good we are, blah blah" - they've barely been used because there are no staff to be there. Some have been used as a morgue because hospital morgues are full to the brim. But some are completely empty. Waste of money, waste of resources, waste of time.

The Nightingales are going to be used very differently to how they were used in April / May. Lessons have been learned. The level of skill needed to care for very sick covid patients was, and is, in short supply.. they discovered that they couldn't staff the Nightingales, and thus, hospitals were told to send staff - which they couldn't.

This time they are being opened as step down care. So, patients that aren't covid, and require hospital care, but not the highly skilled or high dependency care. This means that general nursing skills are needed, not the specialist skills.
This is turn means that much needed beds within hospitals are freed up. The main UCLH hospital has announced it is going to be entirely dedicated to covid patients - so having somewhere for the rest of the patients to go will free up these beds for covid patients. Having worked on similar provision, but smaller scale, during initial lockdown, it was something that was very much needed.

Yes, in London, there are private hospitals with ICU facilities and these are being used for NHS cancer related operations and other extensive procedures especially if the patient is highly vulnerable to covid (or likely to become so as a result of the procedure). For example lists are being done in London Bridge hospital for Guys/Thomas and St Georges (someine I know has had two NHS operations done there in 2020 for that reason)

Nightingales may well be used for those who cannot yet safely be safely discharged, but do not require individual nursing or multi disciplinary teams. It'll still be a conundrum his to staff them, but you won't need to find as many staff as you would for intensive and high dependency patients

@RosesAndHellebores is correct. I am currently wading through the red tape to start as a vaccinator. Have done all my vax training, basic life support, anaphylaxis training etc. Have just got information gov, prevent radicalisation and a few others to do. Am taking today off though. And I also think I may have to get another DBS at £44 cost to me. I’ve got one from April, but they’ll probably require another.
Onwards and upwards!!
Happy New Year. It’s got to be better than last year, surely.

Our nurse relation is usually on a Recovery Team. has been working on ICU and Covid only wards. One of their pressures is to restart elective 'routine' surgery.
A 100 miles from Rochester but have Kent patients.

I am waiting for urology operation, but no chance as I don't have cancer linked condition.

Staffing is proving much easier than thought because the high level skills aren't needed.

I'm just not sure they will have enough of an impact to make much difference. We need 5,000 extra beds urgently

Maybe we're suffering from "the boy who cried wolf" with the messaging on this. Years of the media exaggerating everything, endless complaints that the NHS is beyond capacity and people are being left to die in corridors, and politicians being generally dishonest. So now if we are told that things are really bad, people don't trust the information.

The conspiracy-theorist accusations are tiresome because they lump in anyone who questions any aspect of the Covid narrative or political decision-making in with David Icke and the people who think 5G is melting their brain.

Papatron has it in one. Ever since my DC were born between 94 to 98 all I have ever heard from NHS staff: when the clinic overruns by 2.5 hours, when the appointment is sent for the wrong day, when staff make little cock-ups, is we are underfunded and under resourced, so yes I think the Behemoth does cry wolf. Not made harder to believe by virtue of the fact that every time I gave had a family member admitted overnight, the gaggle if nurses at the nursing station has giggled and squealed about: holidays, parties and blokes. Oh, but if one asks for pain relief on behalf of a lived one they are busy and if one dares to say "well there have been 4 of you giggling for an hour" one us treated to the NHS eye roll and sometimes a kissing of the teeth. It is really not edifying and it makes it difficult to take the present complaints seriously.

I am sorry for those who do work hard but ime there are rather a lot who don't and when they do do it without good grace and as though they are doing the scummy public a huge favour. They are not, they are doing their job.

I work in a hospital, sometimes on the covid ward, and I think schools should go back

Papatron and RosesAndHellebores so you are suggesting that the NHS aren't struggling with the pandemic and staff are generally just lazy?!

Wow. You really should go and work in critical care for a few days. My brother often does a 12-hour shift and doesn't have time to go to their locker room to get a drink of water (they are not allowed to keep drinks etc. on the ward any more).

And you think that even Boris Johnson's concerns about the NHS being overwhelmed is some kind of fantasy?

[quote inquietant]@TheLittleDogLaughed

Conspiracy theories are psychologically comforting as a master plan is less terrifying than the reality that we have little control.

Ultimately goodies can defeat a conspiracy. No one can defeat random events.[/quote]
This.

There is a proportion of society that doesn't have the emotional capacity to handle/believe unpleasant realities & would rather engage in any form of projection/distraction as therapeutic coping strategy. It's a denial born, fundamentally, due to mental & emotional incapacity to deal with what is actually happening around them. Unfortunately, in this situation, it results in such 'emotionally weak' individuals non-conforming to rules because they have convinced themselves of an alternative reality. V v foolish behaviour......never ends well, either for the individual or as a society.

Didn't spot this shared on here yet: mobile.twitter.com/mbklee_/status/1344795588039208961

I wonder if we need more in-hospital media? It feels like too many people are totally disconnected from reality now.

inquietant that is literally completely insane. What is wrong with those people? So frightening ...

No I am saying that that there was once a boy who cried wolf too many times and when the wolf came nobody believed him.

I agree @inquietant that the news need to be reporting more from the ground as such. Unfortunately the deniers would scream scaremongering though. The people outside that hospital... I don't have any words left.

No wolves here anymore.. ... face reality as it is

RosesAndHellebores you make no sense. Have you considered that what you thought was 'crying wolf' might have been the truth? The NHS HAS been under strain for years. If anything it's underreported on by the media. And what's happening now is way more serious than anything in our lifetimes before; you can't brush it off with some stupid lazy idiom.

We currently have 1100 patients in our Trust, 490 of them are positive and 261 pending swab result but also suspected Covid. We’ve shut down whole departments and redeployed the staff, essential oncology operations are being cancelled as the surgical wards and ITU beds are all Covid now and there’s no room for anything else.

My ward is meant to be clean but we’ve got Covid patients in our side rooms who have tested positive after admission and now there’s nowhere else for them to go in the hospital. There are ambulances parked out the back of A&E with Covid patients in them. We have 40 staff on my ward and 23 of us were off sick with Covid at the same time.

So yes, it really is all true.