Photos unveiled documenting the NHS frontline's coronavirus experiences
By Kris Jepson
Exclusive: ITV News Tyne Tees has been given exclusive access to a collection of photographs taken at The James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough during the peak of the Coronavirus pandemic.
The images were captured on the COVID wards at the height of the crisis by a doctor who wants it to be a permanent memory for the staff, patients and families impacted by the virus.
Dr Matthew Jones, an acute medicine doctor, told ITV News: "I think for the staff, I hope that it will offer them a way to create a sort of positive, emotional memory, which will help them sustain their sort of morale over the difficult weeks, months, years ahead."
Watch @krisjepson's exclusive report here:
For more than three months, staff at the South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust have been treating patients who were seriously ill with COVID-19.
Working under extreme pressure, they have had to make difficult phone calls to relatives and comfort dying patients in their final moments.
Critical care consultant, Dr Alex Scott, told ITV News 2020 has been the "hardest time" of his career.
Dr Scott recalled one evening where a patient was desperately sick and staff were really worried that he wasn’t going to survive.
Dr Matthew Jones is an acute medicine doctor at The James Cook University Hospital. He is an avid photographer in his spare time and wanted to document the unfolding pandemic at his workplace to create a permanent record of what his colleagues and he have experienced so that it is not forgotten.
He said when he first went into the Covid ward it was "like a war zone".
He told ITV News "I was intimidated. I was quite afraid. You don’t know what is on the other side of that curtain. It almost feels like entering a war zone and yet it’s amazing how sort of calm and composed the staff are.
Dr Jones spent one weekend on a respiratory ward and during that weekend his staff lost eight patients to coronavirus.
At times the pandemic has become too much for frontline NHS staff at the hospital. Senior Sister, Joanne Charlton, said teamwork and friendship has been vital to keep morale of the team positive.
She explained how her job has been made much more difficult with the restrictiveness of having to wear personal protective equipment or PPE and said the physical contact, hugs, embracing colleagues is important.
Joanne Charlton told ITV News, "It’s kind of what you need really, to see you through the day. We’re used to working in that environment and for it being busy all the time, but the workload has just increased and the pressure and the PPE, it just, everything feels so much harder. So, as a team, we’ve really come together to support each other."
The COVID ward is like no world we know. Doctors and nurses look like alien beings when fully kitted out in their PPE and masks. One nurse said it makes communicating with patients essential in order to reassure them.
Critical Care Staff Nurse, Kate Chamberlain, said she has been comforted by working at the same hospital as her dad. During lockdown, their time together at work was the only time they could actually see each other.
Reflecting on the photo with her father, Kate said: "I’d actually had a really quite stressful day. I’d had quite a poorly patient. My dad had come on for the night shift and I was just leaving from the day shift and we were just having a little chat and a little PPE cuddle and it was obviously the only way I could see him at the time."