Hi nquartz
I’m doing ok thanks.
The decision was made a few weeks ago that the unit I work on (comprises of 6 different areas: an outpatient department, a day care unit and 4 wards) will have some of it closed off to accommodate Covid patients, so that is now what has happened. This has obviously had a negative knock-on effect to the care our unit is trying to provide.
Due to these closures, various members of the staff (across all 6 of our units) will be redeployed to Covid wards and Critical Care wards for a minimum of 6 months.
We are expecting the decision of who those people will be to be announced in the next week or so. All week at work tensions have been awful and there are a lot of scared staff around.
The preparation we have had for this is an hours classroom training in critical care and half an hours online training about how to use certain equipment they have up there.
None of are adult trained nurses, we are from another domain of nursing, hence why we have had this wonderful training programme 
Numerous staff have been in tears about what we may have to face and we are on edge everyday just waiting to hear the announcement of who will be moving.
The fact that staff are now being told to re-use long sleeved gowns due to shortages doesn’t help matters. Saying that though, a friend of mine works on a geriatric ward with many Covid patients and they haven’t had long sleeved gowns for almost two weeks now and simply just have to wear their flimsy plastic white aprons. The advice they were given was just to make sure they wash their arms as well as their hands. How helpful.
It’s frightening what’s going on.
I was watching an interview on TV last night (can’t remember who was being interviewed, a medical director of some sort) and the interviewer asked him if now that nurses have had even more correct PPE taken from then, then isn’t it right they should be able to refuse to go near the patients? The gentleman kept skirting around the issue and tried to give a generic responses but she kept re-asking him the question and saying, “but surely they have the right to refuse when they are being asked to risk their own lives for no other reason than that the Goverment/NHS (whoever she felt was failing) was failing to protect them.
The best she got out of him was that he said it’s not his place to determine what moral judgements nurses and doctors should make.
I guess he felt like a lot of other people (including some posters on this thread) that just because we are medical staff that means we are simply expected to put ourselves at risk, including risking our lives, because it’s our “moral duty”.
It’s because of attitudes like this that the medical staff are screwed and the Goverment/NHS/WHO/DoH can say/do whatever they wish because they don’t expect any of us to stand up for ourselves and our own rights.
It sucks.