Inside the Acute Dependency Ward at St George's Hospital, Tooting
Tap above to watch the video report by Chloe Keedy
In the Acute Dependency Unit at St George’s Hospital in Tooting, staff are exhausted. Patients are referred here from Accident & Emergency if they are very unwell and, on the day we visit, around a third are being treated for Covid. Many are reliant on CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure) machines to help them breathe.
Staff say one of the biggest logistical challenges is trying to keep patients who don’t have Covid separate from the ever-growing volume that do. Clinicians who have been working flat out for almost a year are now faced with a second wave where, not only are they seeing many more patients than they did during the first, this time it’s winter. Ward Matron Siobhan Burke says it’s the most challenging thing she’s ever had to deal with in her career.
62 year old Cristina Isaura-Lucas was brought in overnight. She knows this ward - she usually works here as a nurse. She says she must have caught Covid while on shift, and now she is a patient, being cared for by her colleagues. As she speaks, she is clearly in pain and struggling for breath, but she says she only wants to get better, so she can come back to work and help people.
The hospital currently has 11 wards caring for 280 people with Covid-19, and that’s before you get to intensive care.
The unit we film inside is usually for people with brain and spinal injuries, but at the moment every one of its 14 beds is being used to treat someone who is critically ill with Covid-19. The hospital currently has 129 intensive care beds - more than double its usual number.
Clinical Director Dominic Spray tells me they are already working out which bit of the hospital they can expand into next. He says one of his greatest frustrations is knowing that there are people at home in urgent need of hospital treatment, or an operation that would require them to spend time in critical care, who cannot get that treatment because the hospital beds are full of Covid patients.
On top of everything else, there is another challenge staff at St George’s are dealing with. Just before we started filming in the Acute Dependency Unit - we heard some shouting and a scuffle. Security and police had to be called because a family member of someone with Covid was abusing a member of staff.
The consultant we were chatting to at the time told us this wasn’t an unusual occurrence.
Staff at St George’s are stretched to their limit - but somehow they seem to stay cheerful. They are bracing themselves for things to get worse before they get better. When we asked them how they will cope over the next few weeks, the response was, quite simply, ‘we have to.’
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