To ask what NHS frontline staff think of Breathtaking?

[CloudyYellow]

I have watched all 3 episodes. I worked on the frontline during Covid. I found it very triggering and my fury is back.

Most CH do have en suite bathrooms as the market demands it but the joke is that very few residents are actually able to use them as few can wash or even toilet independently and many require 2 staff to assist who cannot all fit in a tiny en-suite bathroom so the residents are actually taken to the larger communal bathrooms to be washed and the en suites are mostly ornamental.

So actually yes poor conditions in care homes literally are the Tory government's fault because they do not adequately fund local authorities so that they can pay better rates that are enough for care staff to be adequately paid and trained. The proposed lifetime cap on care fees due to come in next year as a sop to rich old Tory voters who don't want to sell their homes for care fees will only worsen the situation as it will stop the covert cross subsidy of LA residents by self funders which is actually the only way the sector survives. Good care is costly. I really do not understand what is the issue with people being required to sell a home they are not living in to pay for that.

A shocking watch. Not only did it bring back the awfulness of being in lockdown but also seeing that side of it. For the first 18m I didn't know a single person with covid all I had was the newspaper reports and news bulletins. It's unbelievable what was going on behind the scenes.

It seems like a joke that we clapped once a week now.

Does It showcase the TikTok dancing nurses rehearsing in the empty hospitals?

They were empty because there were no visitors or staff walking around due to infection control. Outpatient clinics were cancelled. I find it hard to believe grown adults don’t realise this.

You could watch the show.

Stop being so pathetic and juvenile.

When everything was reconfigured and everyone sent home and people didn't want to come to AE in case they caught it, there was a week or so it actually was quite quiet and that was when the videos circulated. People were sourcing home made cpap machines etc and drawing up plans and separating corridors etc. That prep time was quite eeirie then it all started and it was so busy with new plans, meetings, adjustments, teaching, all the cases, getting changed all the time.
The series brought back the fear - we were all terrified it felt like you could catch it and become instantly very sick we just didn't know what to expect.

Bugger me- it was a bit tough.
unless you can come out of your hole and admit you have no idea what clinical staff actually went through then please just shut the hell up.
you have zero empathy for what we did and what we are still trying to cope with regarding the after effects.
you are coming across as just belittling and ignorant of what we went through.
No one is saying it wasn’t global, no one is saying everywhere struggled. What I and others are saying is that the programme sadly is acutely accurate of what occurred.

'unless you can come out of your hole and admit you have no idea what clinical staff actually went through then please just shut the hell up.'

I'm not in 'a hole' and no I won't shut the hell up. Its a chat forum, you will encounter a wide range of differing opinions on many issues. You shouldn't go around telling people to 'shut the hell up'.

Breathtaking was written by someone wirh a well known political agenda so of course it is not impartial. I've listened to plenty of stories of what when on in the nhs, again it was tough but there was a pandemic, What did you expect? We managed far better than overwhelmed Italy for starters.

No we didn't at all, the NHS was and still is "overrun"

Italy tried to treat everyone, with more beds and nurses they could treat more, its only now that we see what really happened in UK hospitals, our media supported the Govt line.

Longer term, Italy's health service is back to where it was, but the NHS has 8m on waiting lists, 12 hr waits in AE, the worst cancer care in Europe, larger and larger staffing issues, a shortfall of over 40k nurses, more nurses leaving than starting nurse training.
Thats before we get to other AHPS like Midwives, Physio's, OTs and Radiographers, again huge shortages.

MH provision is almost non existent.

Once again, the program was based on a book written by a Labour party supporter (with input from many other NHS staff, with editorial control for balance) but unless you can prove she & everyone else, is lying, why should we not listen to views from other sources? isn't that how we all learn?

'Once again, the program was based on a book written by a Labour party supporter'

Yep.

'but unless you can prove she & everyone else, is lying'

I can't prove anything. Like everyone else on here my comments are based on anecdotes from nhs staff.

Critical care capacity was quadrupled. Routine ops cancelled. Critical care was given whatever resources and staff that they needed. That, I'm afraid is as good as it gets in a deadly pandemic. Anyone who would benefit from respiratory support received it, even if it was in theatres as opposed to ICU.

Of course there are longer waits and a knock effect. Cancelling all routine care and imposing lockdown comes at a price.

I can't prove anything

We shall leave it there

You do know it's a chat forum and not a court of law yes? All comments are anecdotal unless you'd like us to submit written and signed statements to you?

Not into quoting partial out of context comments, you shouldn't either, weakens your argument, your choice though.

Are your remarks really based on NHS staff? or your political views?

No people did not receive the care they should of, my Aunt didn't and neither did my partners Gran, who died at home as there was nowhere to send her, 100s of 1000s didn't either, widely reported.

Knock on effects - why is it that no other country in Europe has such "knock on effects"?
The pandemic affected us all, yet its the UK that has these issues.

Are you really saying that anyone who supports the Labour party shouldn't have a voice?

Do you also think Alan Bates shouldn't have been allowed a platform on TV either?
Have we entered a world where the only truth is from the mouths of Tories?

're your remarks really based on NHS staff? or your political views? No people did not receive the care they should of'

NHS staff. Many on the 'front line'.

Of course people didn't receive the care they should have there was a pandemic, but if they needed respiratory support and deemed candidates that had a chance of survival, so not very elderly with multiple chronic health problems (as is the norm in critical care anyway) they got it.

It was well reported at the time that patients died because of a lack of equipment.

Now i'm certainly not saying thats all the Tories fault at all, chances are no amount of icu and ventilators could have ever been provided but to deny it never happened is ridiculous and goes against many NHS staffs' real experiences.

You may as well argue the UKs cancer care is brilliant and no one goes without.

To 'peakygold'. You sound very angry and I sympathise with your feelings. I wonder if you feel your needs/sacrifices were ignored because themedia and the rest of us concentrated on the sectors where people were very obviously at risk. I am sorry that you feel like this and suggest you maybe get some help to talk through your feelings and also,if needed, help to cope with any aftermath you are sufferring. Truly,none of us should have been treated so badly. But your comment about Rachel Clarke 'finding time to write the book during thepandemic' is inaccurate,I think. She kept a brief diary at the time,which has helped her and us to be better informed and she wrote the book afterwards. Also,you seem annoyed that NHS employees,whatever theirrole,were allowed to queue jump and were given presents.I agree this is unfair, but it's nothing new.In many situations,there are people whose contribution is overlooked,while the more visible person is praised.How many of us thank or give presents to our children's teachers, but don't acknowledge thecleaners/lunchtime supervisors -although these people also perform a vital role. We tend to think of the doctors and nurses in hospitals,but not the pharmacists, radiographers,physios,occupation therapists,porters,ward clerks,cleaners etc. Giving 'treats' to NHS staff was a bit clumsy in some ways,but I doubt any NHS staff thought the pizza or chocs actually repaid them for the horrendous pressures they were under.

Medics in other countries who have watched this are often shocked at what was happening in the UK.

Of course they should have cohorted infected patients and not discharged to care homes but medics were supportive of this at the time. It’s not like there was a Tory bed manager in the hospital with a clipboard. Doctors were eagerly ushering people out the door including in the non Tory devolved nations. You forget, we thought there was going to be a massive influx and we would need every bed. Government and clinical staff saw nursing home patients as expendable. The brutal truth is many nursing home residents do have short life expectancy but not all. Basic medical care such as oral antibiotics weren’t given in many cases because it was assumed people were dying of covid but many died of pneumonia or plain old neglect.

The tories are an incompetent disaster but you’re kidding yourself if you think Labour would have been any better. They didn’t fail because they were too ideologically right wing but because they were too blinded by preheld beliefs and fallacies to assess the situation and lacked the bravery for difficult decisions.

Basically we fucked up badly and no one quite wants to admit it yet. Lots of people died because of it, some were harmed badly and most of of will live worse lives. It’s countless times worse than if we had just ignored the novel virus, incalculable damage. We overreacted when we should have kept our cool, then we made it worse with bad decisions time and time again. We need a good hard look at our media, at the quality of our so called scientific institutions and whether we care more about material reality or more political point scoring.

If we had “kept our cool”, by which I presume you mean avoided the first lockdown and kept schools open, far, far more people would have died in 2020 both in and out of hospitals.

Are you taking a purely utilitarian approach and suggesting that this collateral damage would have been preferable to what has actually happened?

It's all said with the benefit of hindsight though isn't it? When this new virus first arrived we did not know who would be most susceptible. It could have decimated children and young adults like Spanish flu did which would have been even less acceptable to society

If we had chosen not to lock down when the rest of the world was doing that would certainly have been an outlier as a decision.

Whilst it turns out that it is mainly older people who died of Covid a) we did not know that at the outset and b) a small percentage of a very large number is still a large number. Had we not locked down and 'let it rip' many more people would have died overall, all at once in an overwhelming therefore traumatic way and more younger people would also have died.

It was bad enough as it was. If we had not locked down and 'let it rip' then NHS staff would need to know that society was accepting that we would let people die and would have no hope of saving them. It's the attitude that we simultaneously are to blame for not doing enough to save elderly people dying in care homes and also did too much by having lock downs that I cannot understand. You can't have one without the other either we accept that many people will die and pay that price as a society or we take the pain of lockdowns.

People blaming care home and hospital staff for not preventing Covid getting in or not saving infected people want to have their cake and eat it. When the levels in the community were so high it was an utterly impossible task to keep it out and there was no effective treatment.

The harms from the lockdowns were and are also terrible but we did not have the ability to properly weigh up which would be worst at the time.

Obviously can’t speak for every hospital, but in ours we were completely taken by surprise by the speed it spread - we were trying to get people out of hospital and into care homes at a point where we thought there were only 5 cases in the UK, it was thought to only be a risk if you’d come back from certain parts of Italy, and testing could only be done in special infectious diseases testing centres (Guys and Royal Free in London, from memory). We were trying to get them out to safety, before the pandemic hit, but obviously had no idea they could be infected already at that point in time.

And then a week later, literally our entire hospital had it. We were swamped. Nobody thought we should discharge people to nursing homes at that point. This was long before lockdown, incidentally - it was the first week of March when things suddenly went nuts.

I do think people at NHSE/SAGE etc should have known what to expect in advance, but I’m not going to blame jobbing doctors and nurses, who had no experience of infectious disease outbreaks, for thinking they were doing the right thing based on what they were being told at the time.

@ThePure we did know. The virus had already hit China and Italy. But on MN there were lots arguing that somehow British people were different and the virus would not hit in the same way. It should not have been a surprise when it did.