I thought I would write about what it was really like nursing in the pandemic, seeing as though everyone seems to think we are over, but we are coming out the other side!
I worked as a nurse in police custody at the start of the pandemic and when it first started we were not sure what was going on it was all a bit confusing, we only had 3 sets of full PPE to be used in the event of a confirmed case, we had masks and aprons and gloves of course. But if I'm honest, it was scary, never knowing who was coming into your custody room and not being able to test anyone, we had to make the best of it. You can't social distance in police cells and anyone who was even remotely suspected of being covid positive was assumed to be so.And then I was getting undressed in my front passage because I didnt want to bring covid home!
During the pandemic I changed jobs twice, don't ask me why I just felt it needed to be done, the first time I moved into prison healthcare, this was somewhere I had worked before but I had no idea what was facing me there.
Covid 19 does not discriminate, it attacks prisoners as well as the general public, but lock down and social distancing doesn't work in prison! we got calls to healthcare every day with another prisoner displaying symptoms, we had to go and test them all, and we had very little ppe. We faced opposition from some prisoners, because the cell mate had symptoms they both had to isolate and I even had someone tell me that covid 19 wasn't real, and to be honest it felt unreal at times.
It was really difficult to tell a prisoner they had covid because of what it meant for them, being literally locked in a cell for 10 days with your meals being bought to your door, they already spent more time locked up than usual and had no visits or education due to lockdown. In the beginning, officers were scared to let them out and they didn't get showers or exercise for 10 days. Onto of that courts had closed down so there was unrest in the inmates.
Honestly when we got the call to say someone was positive my heart sank, and I was scared we had all heard the stories of health care workers who had died, and we were not immune(although I didn't make this obvious to my staff) because it was my job to go and inform them and sometimes we didn't have the right ppe to be in touch with a positive patient, and then there was the added pressure of wether they would be ill!
We had prisoners who got sick, too many of them, in the beginning we didn't have risk assessments so we didn't know who was at risk, we would get a call to say someone was struggling and not know what we were going to find when we arrived on scene, contrary to belief we had very little equipment and barely enough oxygen to go round, we would have to decided who to send to hospital and sometimes the paramedics didn't want to take them in, they were just as scared as we were.
we introduced risk assessments and this increased our workload 10 fold, because every positive patient who was medium or high risk had to be checked on at least once a day and we started getting more and more, we had mini outbreaks on wings and when we started testing new arrivals it was even worse, they were not isolated properly by the prison and the infection just spread. And luckily my husband was keeping me up to date from twitter to all the latest research.
I remember one day we lost five of our patients in a matter of days, it was no joke.
there were days we ran out of masks and had to cope with minimal equipment , and then there was the extra testing, we were tested eventually, twice weekly but we had to test everyone who came into custody and there was errors with collecting the samples so sometimes they sat in the clinical room for 2 days. Then when the vaccine finally arrived we didn't know for a long time when we were getting it, we waited longer than most of our NHS colleagues The prison service was the forgotten service !
I found it hard to work in the prison it was a stressful environment with added risks and I decided to change jobs again, this time I went to community respiratory team where I am now!
This role has its challenges, we couldn't car share so I had to find my way around a new area pretty quickly, and the added bonus of trying to put your ppe on in the wind and rain outside a patients home is a challenge in itself.
Covid was still a challenge but in a different way, I wasn't directly in contact with sick patients anymore but my patients were afraid and I had to reassure them which is hard to do when you have seen the damage covid does.
Then there is redeployment, due to covid the district nursing teams were on there knees, like many primary care services they carried on as normal throughout covid and were really struggling, this was one of the hardest things I ever did and I can't say it was a pleasure but it felt good to know I was helping my colleagues.
Its not all negative, there weren't some positive moments, like the lack of traffic on the roads during lockdown and pulling together as a team, although I found it hard to be called a hero and the claps for carers made me cringe.
Covid hasn't gone away no matter what Boris says, its here and people are still getting sick and dying, we are dealing with its consequences everyday in small and larger ways but I would like to think that during the worst of it I did my bit and made a difference.
Dedicated to all those who have lost their lives during this pandemic
