Treating patients during the pandemic was like responding to a daily terror attack, the Covid inquiry has heard.<\/p>\n
Giving testimony, Professor Kevin Fong, spoke of staff he met during a hospital visit being in \u00ab\u00a0total bits\u00a0\u00bb.<\/p>\n
The former national clinical adviser in emergency preparedness at NHS England recalled a conversation with an intensive care doctor during a visit in December 2020.<\/p>\n
\u201cI asked him immediately what things had been like and\u2026 I\u2019ll never forget, he replied it\u2019s been like a terrorist attack every day since it started, and we don\u2019t know when the attacks are going to stop.\u201d<\/p>\n
Prof Fong described Covid as the \u201cbiggest national emergency this country has faced since World War Two\u201d, and repeatedly broke down in tears on the stand while describing what he had seen and his conversations with other staff members.<\/p>\n
During the pandemic, Prof Fong, a consultant anaesthetist, conducted around 40 visits of the \u00ab\u00a0hardest hit\u00a0\u00bb intensive care units on behalf of NHS England to offer peer support to the doctors and nurses working there.<\/p>\n
He wrote reports which were sent back to senior managers including England\u2019s chief medical officer Prof Sir Chris Whitty.<\/p>\n
He said the \u201cscale of death\u201d was \u201cvery difficult to capture in the figures\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was truly, truly astounding\u2026 We had nurses talking about patients \u2018raining from the sky\u2019, where one of the nurses told me they got tired of putting people in body bags.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe went to another unit where things got so bad they were so short of resources, they ran out of body bags and instead were stuck with nine-foot clear plastic sacks and cable ties.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThese are people who are used to seeing death but not on that scale and not like that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Prof Fong said that \u201cdespite the best efforts of everyone in the system\u201d the surge of demand for healthcare caused by Covid meant it was \u201cnot possible to deliver the standard of care that would ordinarily be expected.\u201d<\/p>\n
He described the situation as the worst he had witnessed: \u00ab\u00a0I was on the scene of the Soho bombing in 1999, I worked in the emergency department during the 7th July suicide bombing with the helicopter medical service. And nothing I saw during all of those events was as bad as really Covid was every single day for every single one of these hospitals through the pandemic surges.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s painful now because it was very clear what was happening to the patients, it was very clear what was happening to the staff. The staff were very injured by just how overwhelmed they were by the whole thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
In December 2020 as Covid rates were rising again across the UK, he said he was asked to visit an unnamed hospital with a medium-sized intensive care unit.<\/p>\n
\u00ab\u00a0I’ll never forget it,\u00a0\u00bb he said. \u00ab\u00a0It was a scene from hell.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n
\u00ab\u00a0This was a hospital in massive, massive trouble…. there were so few staff that some of the nurses had chosen to either use the patient commodes [or] wear adult diapers because there was literally no one to give them a toilet break,\u00a0\u00bb he added.<\/p>\n
\u00ab\u00a0This was a hospital breaking at the seams.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n
At the end of his evidence, he was thanked by the inquiry\u2019s chairwoman Baroness Hallett who said \u201cit was obvious how distressing it was for you and reliving such an ordeal is never easy.\u201d<\/p>\n
England’s chief medical officer Prof Sir Chris Whitty, who was next to speak at the inquiry, said he agreed with the evidence \u00ab\u00a0very powerfully laid out\u00a0\u00bb by Prof Fong.<\/p>\n
He said that NHS hospitals in England entered the pandemic in early 2020 with a \u201cvery low\u201d level of beds in intensive care compared to similar high-income countries.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat’s a political choice. It’s a system configuration choice, but it is a choice,\u201d he told the inquiry.<\/p>\n
\u201cTherefore, you have less in reserve when a major emergency happens, even if it’s short of something of the scale of covid.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sir Chris suggested that countries like the UK had no alternative but to impose lockdown and other social restrictions to avoid a \u201ccatastrophic\u201d amount of pressure on the healthcare system.<\/p>\n
He accepted that \u201cin many individual cases\u201d doctors and nurses found the situation \u201cincredibly difficult\u201d but said without lockdown restrictions \u201cthe expectation is it would have got worse. Not a trivial amount worse, but really quite substantially worse\u201d.<\/p>\n
Asked about PPE for healthcare workers, Sir Chris said that messaging around which masks NHS staff should wear was \u00ab\u00a0confused\u00a0\u00bb at the start of the pandemic, leading to an \u00ab\u00a0erosion of trust\u00a0\u00bb.<\/p>\n
He suggested that more research was needed to see if a higher grade FFP3 mask offered more protection than a basic surgical mask in real-life hospital use, rather than in a laboratory.<\/p>\n
\u00ab\u00a0The question is what happens when people are using it day-in and day-out in operational circumstances, and if it doesn’t hold up in that situation, it’s not doing a heck of a lot of good,\u00a0\u00bb he said.<\/p>\n
In a future pandemic, he said he would give healthcare workers the choice of which mask to wear \u00ab\u00a0within reason\u00a0\u00bb.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Treating patients during the pandemic was like responding to a daily terror attack, the Covid inquiry has heard. Giving testimony, Professor Kevin Fong, spoke of staff he met during a hospital visit being in \u00ab\u00a0total bits\u00a0\u00bb. The former national clinical adviser in emergency preparedness at NHS England recalled a conversation with an intensive care doctor […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-9459","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/placedesnations.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/placedesnations.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/placedesnations.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/placedesnations.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/placedesnations.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9459\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/placedesnations.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/placedesnations.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/placedesnations.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}