The situation is so dire that staff are frequently breaking down in tears. Patients with suspected COVID-19 are mixing with non-COVID-19 patients.
Doctors have been forced to go to hardware stores to buy their own face masks. Stickers with new expiry dates are being put on PPE that expired in 2016. Proper testing of masks is being omitted.
Even where there is PPE, there may be no training. Health workers are challenged if they ask for face masks. I receive examples daily of doctors having to assess patients with respiratory symptoms but who do so without the necessary PPE to complete their jobs safely. But she was wrong and she should apologise to the thousands of health workers who still have no access to WHO-standard PPE. I am sure Dr Harries believed what she said. How can we do this? It is criminal…NHS England was not prepared…We feel completely helpless.”Ĭopyright © 2020 Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty ImagesĮngland's Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Jenny Harries, said on March 20, 2020: “The country has a perfectly adequate supply of PPE.” She claimed that supply pressures had now been “completely resolved”. I don't feel protected.” “We are literally making it up as we go along.” “It feels as if we are actively harming patients.” “We need protection and prevention.” “Total carnage.” “NHS Trusts continue to fail miserably.” “Humanitarian crisis.” “Forget lockdown-we are going into meltdown.” “When I was country director in many conflict zones, we had better preparedness.” “The hospitals in London are overwhelmed.” “The public and media are not aware that today we no longer live in a city with a properly functioning western health-care system.” “How will we protect our patients and staff…I am speechless. Still no access to personal protective equipment or testing.” “Rigid command structures make decision making impossible.” “There's been no guidelines, it's chaos.” “I don't feel safe. “It's terrifying for staff at the moment. Their messages have been as distressing as they have been horrifying. I asked NHS workers to contact me with their experiences. But this plan, agreed far too late in the course of the outbreak, has left the NHS wholly unprepared for the surge of severely and critically ill patients that will soon come. The UK now has a new plan-Suppress–Shield–Treat–Palliate. These basic principles of public health and infectious disease control were ignored, for reasons that remain opaque. It failed, in part, because ministers didn't follow WHO's advice to “test, test, test” every suspected case. The UK Government's Contain–Delay–Mitigate–Research strategy failed. The scale of anger and frustration is unprecedented, and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is the cause. “When this is all over, the NHS England board should resign in their entirety.” So wrote one National Health Service (NHS) health worker last weekend.
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