Hospitals providing extra support to staff to deal with the impact of coronavirus crisis on mental health
Her smile is as bright as the yellow badge bearing her name but it belies the heavy toll Covid-19 has demanded from her.
Natasha Salmon, a respiratory nurse at the University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, works with a team who were among the first in the hospital to treat coronavirus cases.
"Obviously Covid is a respiratory virus, so very early on we were getting the Covid patients prior to the rest of the hospital because we had respiratory experience,'" she told ITV News.
Despite their wealth of medical knowledge nothing prepared the staff for the rate at which lives were being taken.
"It's emotionally taxing because obviously these staff watch the news, they see what's going on in the world beyond nursing. We're not nurses all the time, we're normal people as well," she said.
As a ward manager, Ms Salmon oversees a team of nurses and has found the pandemic presenting her staff with a different dilemma outside the scope of medicine.
"I find that they will have family members who are concerned...obviously the family know that they work on the respiratory ward, so they know they're looking after these patients that they're watching on the news and the news is telling them how dangerous this virus is...so they're dealing with family conflicts of coming to work and making the decision to come to work."
Another concern for staff is the increasing levels of end of life care they're having to provide for patients who can't say goodbye to families in person.
End of Life Clinical Nurse Specialist Fiona Dakin told ITV News: "We're used to dealing with patients who die but over the last few weeks the numbers...it's more than what we'd normally be dealing with. Those conversations that would normally be had over several days are having to be made almost immediately."
The physical and mental demands of being a frontline NHS staff worker haven't gone unnoticed by military veterans.
Carol Betteridge, a retired navy nurse who served in Afghanistan, believes there are 'parallels' between the wars fought overseas and the current battle unfolding in UK hospital wards.
"Anybody in the armed forces will tell you 'no two battles are the same' and this is a really unprecedented time with huge numbers of casualties but there definitely are some parallels," she told ITV News.
"The NHS staff are leaving their families, they're donning a uniform, they're going into an unpredictable environment against an invisible enemy and that takes a lot of courage and a lot of strength."
Concerns have been raised about the long term effect this pandemic will have on the mental health of NHS staff.
In an attempt to provide short-term support, hospitals have called on their chaplains.
Reverend Jackie Gayle works at University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust and says the changes in stress levels can at times be visible. Her conversations with healthcare workers have little to do with presence or absence of faith.
"I ask them to express or explain to me what is it that they're feeling, what is that they're trying to articulate, what feelings come to mind when you're saying 'it's one to many.'"
Asked how she's coping with being the shoulder people lean on, she said: "It's just about knowing your purpose."
"Obviously my faith has a lot to do with it, I take everything to God in prayer in the morning."
Quiet rooms or so-called wobble rooms have also been put in place around hospitals. The space exists for staff who need to press pause during their shifts.
Measuring the effect Covid-19 will have on the mental health of NHS staff, will take time.
For now, many are attempting to cope with a very human response to their heroic work.