Scaremongering threads about children - RCPCH have responded to worrying Twitter claims

[NaughtipussMaximus]

The RCPCH have responded to reassure parents and refute the claims on twitter and elsewhere about increased numbers of children with serious covid19 in ICUs. Please, if you’re worried about your children, read this and feel better. And if you’re one of the ones perpetuating unsubstantiated reports to further an agenda, please get in the sea.

www.rcpch.ac.uk/news-events/news/rcpch-responds-media-reports-increased-admissions-children-young-people-covid-19?fbclid=IwAR0To78ci_Ra9CXHCAV3pM91MO31zfcpmMlcfxi9-ozdtwPu9n9xE54dPc4

That should say, more transmissible among all or most age groups than the original strain.

@Buttercupcup

I say this as a nurse, what on earth was she thinking?! The NMC and trusts have very clear social media policies and expectations. Once you put something out there it’s out there-whatever that medium-a radio interview/tweet/article. Even if what she wrote/said has been taken out of context or she thought she was doing the public favour or whatever ludicrous idea she had it was unprofessional and against policy. Trusts have comms teams and legal departments so you don’t get in this kind of mess but they can’t defend this sort or behaviour.

Absolutely. Furthermore, it's not as if she is a junior, inexperienced nurse. She is a senior clinician and, as I understand it, an RCN rep. She is in a leadership position and should have known better.

She has done a huge disservice to her colleagues and her patients and should be reconsidering her position, although that decision may well be taken for her by her employers. I'll be reporting her to the NMC.

This is reassuring Nautipuss, yes I meant not affects kids more but is more transmissible...
This is all so hard to navigate because we are dealing with complete unknowns, unknowns like will the virus mutate again etc...I just hope the vaccine comes soon and that everyone takes it up and that’s our ticket out of this mess

I actually feel really bad for Laura duffell. The guardian article shows her exasperation at the situation - this is someone who has been working hard to save lives. We have a huge shortage of nurses and she has been doing long shifts away from her family.

Yes, she should have chosen her words more carefully, but what she says is not necessarily untrue. How do you define a covid patient? Is it a patient WITH covid - who needs to be put on a covid ward even after a fracture fixation? Or is it someone with respiratory/systemic problems due to covid? This segregation of patients according to covid/non covid will create inefficiencies in bed allocation (I assume they will still also have to segregate again for MRSA and diarrhoea to ensure no norovirus outbreaks). Nurses have to deal with a lot of the stuff with bed allocation - so quite plausible that this was her experience. But it is also good to see other staff experiences that it is NOT like that in many other hospitals.

It is plausible that duffell’s experience this winter has been busier than in April for several reasons (in April: less testing, less prevalence of corona positive in certain age/geographical groups, less admissions in spring than winter).

In the guardian article it is not duffell’s words but the journalist’s that link this to the new strain. I do think it was a mistake to imply that the severity of covid in children had changed, but I can understand why someone might come to that conclusion when not taking into account other explanations.

It's not as if she is a junior, inexperienced nurse. She is a senior clinician and, as I understand it, an RCN rep

I was aware she'd (sensibly) be in a union but not that she was a rep, which adds context to her willingness to give the government's actions a kicking

TBF they deserve a kicking, but I'd have thought there was sufficient material for this without resorting to so far unproven claims

She has provoked unnecessary anxiety which is absolutely the last thing a paeds nurse would do.

@Puzzledandpissedoff

It's not as if she is a junior, inexperienced nurse. She is a senior clinician and, as I understand it, an RCN rep

I was aware she'd (sensibly) be in a union but not that she was a rep, which adds context to her willingness to give the government's actions a kicking

TBF they deserve a kicking, but I'd have thought there was sufficient material for this without resorting to so far unproven claims

She's definitely some sort of RCN official - her twitter has an interview with her on Sky fom November where she's described as an RCN spokesperson. And her tweets are very political.

She really should have known better. She MUST have known better. She's done a huge disservice to her colleagues and to the RCN, which is now being portrayed as for loonie far-lefties only. Whatever she was hoping to achieve, she has done the exact opposite.

Actually, thinking about it, the fact that she is an RCN official may be why she hasn't been sacked yet. Her employers will be treading very carefully.

@OrangeSamphire

Sadly my experiences both working in the NHS (and also having two children with varying reasons to have been in hospital more than most) have shown me that there are nurses who can and do lie, and are willing to commit it to record too.

The false deification of nurses in this country leads us to have the wool pulled over our eyes too many times.

Totally agree.

Nurses can do no wrong in the public's eye. It was obvious the story was false but many people believed it because that's what they wanted to believe and this nurse knew that.

@greenbinday I don’t think it was anything to do with her being a nurse, some posters just desperately wanted to believe it. There were a fair few derogatory comments re nurses unfortunately.

the fact that she is an RCN official may be why she hasn't been sacked yet. Her employers will be treading very carefully

Very likely, yes, but the tweets being political is hardly a surprise since I've yet to meet a union rep who isn't

As said, you'd think that valid points would stand on their own merits without the need to drag politics into everything, but it seems they can't resist

Can I just say how much I respect and admire nurses (# not a nurse).

There is no evidence that this nurse said anything factually incorrect about the workload on her wards. The wards of which she spoke might well have been busy. They may have been busy with covid cases.

Neither is there any evidence that this can be extrapolated nationwide. Which is good.

So we can feel fairly reassured for the moment.

There's no need to slag off either this particular nurse nor the nursing profession.

I see she's very recently been elected to the RCN Regional Board for London.

www.rcn.org.uk/get-involved/rcn-elections-and-appointments/results-of-recent-rcn-elections

I'm a member of the RCN. Think I'll let them know my thoughts about this.

@herecomesthsun. I'm a nurse. Many of us are appalled by this woman's actions.

I did get the feeling that she was lying/exaggerating from the upwards inflection in her voice, especially when talking about wards full of kids with COVID.

@herecomesthsun I’m a nurse and know what she was saying was bullshit. Perhaps not about her ward but what she was saying about ICU and staff ratios I knew was her exaggerating the situation.

The staff to patient ratio isn’t safe no and I do believe that to be true, but equally I trained 15 years ago and the ratio has been that on a regular basis on the wards I have worked.
The ICU patient numbers must be an extremely small IcU. I’ve worked in small towns where the minimum was 8 beds with the majority intubated, and if they weren’t very sick they wouldn’t need ICU.

It's worth bearing in mind that just because this virus has been around for 3 months, this doesn't mean it's been noticeable for 3 months, or important.

Let's say cases doubled every week:

Week: cases
1: 1 September
2: 2
3: 4
4: 8
5: 16 October
6: 32
7: 64
8:128
9: 256 November
10: 512
11: 1024
12: 2048
13: 4056 December
14: 8000
15: 16 000
16: 32 000
17: 64 000 January

I've knocked this up really randomly, but just to show that with exponential spread, something can have been around a long time, but only really come into its own in the last few weeks. Given that those numbers (rough and ready as they are, but the proportions will be kind of right) would apply to all ages, you can see that some thing could have been around since September, and it would only be in the tail end of December that we would get anything like meaningful data about a specific age category.

I'd say we're still in the "not enough data" phase of this new variant.

There is no evidence that this nurse said anything factually incorrect about the workload on her wards.

Absolutely, but she was deliberately misleading. She knew her 'revelations' would panic parents and she didn't care, which in my eyes makes her unsuitable for the nursing profession.