All those confititions don’t exist in a vacuum, if you are in the middle of a Covid surge in an acute hospital and an acute community surge and having an outpatient daily Chemotherapy clinic. The risks are massive. We’re talking life and death here. Chemothearpy suppresses the immune system. It’s not like you rock up in an A/E and are triage, told to join the Covid que as a priority, while everyone else is sent home.
Im thinking of some Chemo and Radio therapy centres I know, most are community based if you have a surge in the hospital you are bringing people into contact with it, while also community based, you bring people in from many communities through an infected acute setting, to sit for hours side by side, if one has Covid - that’s a life threatening risk.
The above is just remedial health care risk assessment - it’s actually far more complex then that. Actually activating that risk assessment from a project management point of view is far more complex. It’s like this take Legs data above, 40% of bed cohort taken up with Covid, imagine someone increased your workload by 40% overnight.Then said work load had to be segregated from all your other workload as to ensure your already increased workload didn’t double again next week, oh and by the way you may get sick yourself and die. By the way the 40% figure is conservative to what we had to deal with last winter, it was horrific, the daily suffering witnessed will stay long in the mind, you talk about mental health issues, the level of trauma and lack of wellbeing experienced in health care settings during this I have no doubt will lead to Heath problems for health care workers in the future.
I can’t tell you how frustrating it is after working through waves of this, breaking bad news, trying to give comfort, managing surges and risk, witnessing suffering for patients and families, that people pick apart the work done, sacrifices made and wellbeing impacted. I can gairemtee you if you turned up where I work with Covid or someone close to you, you would want to be prioritised, you would want my team to take it seriously. Peopleare board, but I see more and more people becoming self entitled with “my expieremce of the pandemic” - largely people were asked to watch Netflix, they weren’t exposed to daily trauma of those suffering, dying and the grief of their families. Their opinions now are based on how bored they are as opposed to that trauma. That’s what “living with Covid is”. Every single step of adhering to restrictions makes a difference, it’s not much when you weigh it against the impact and suffering.
The health service is a subjective often assumed right people like to think will always be there to protect them, this isn’t and hasn’t always been the case - we’ve been so close to collapse so many times since this it’s a miracle it’s hasn’t. The entire population and I mean Ireland here have no idea how many bullets they have dodged and how many services were 24 hours from not being able to open or stop taking admissions, gladly this only happened on a couple of occasions.
For those who were and still are, once we deal with this Delta surge we’re facing into huge back logs of acute care, that kept as many as we could safe. But we’re looking at next Spring for that, because I can tell you with racing certainty, the current surge in mild to what we will have in the winter gaurenteed. So enjoy what you can of the summer and the relaxing at the moment.
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