ICU doctor: ‘We hear of more medics dying but we still don’t have the right protection’

As I turn into the car park I have a choice of spaces. This never happens on a Monday, but the hospital is deserted.

I enter through a strangely silent main entrance and onwards through outpatients. Only the scuffing tread of my clogs breaks the empty silence.

Planned surgery and visiting have been cancelled and much of the hospital lies quiet. But these empty corridors are an illusion.

Elsewhere, we are overrun: Accident & Emergency; the Medical Admission Unit and my department – the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). We are full, twice over.

Our normal bed capacity is long-filled with Covid patients and our surge beds filled in a week.

Despite the constant patient flow we are now to follow government advice and double our capacity again.

Having begged, stolen and borrowed to equip our surge beds, who knows where the equipment for this additional capacity will come from, never mind staff?

As we’ve watched the statistics this week, there has been a palpable growth of anxiety through the hospital and particularly my department. Covid patients in ICU more than triple nationally in a week from 50 to 100 and then 150.

The first nurse dies in the UK along with four doctors, against a backdrop of 60 doctors dying in Italy and 25% of health care workers now infected in Spain. The deaths of more medical staff emerged on Friday.

Staff now realise that we are at risk and we still don’t have adequate personal protective equipmen (PPE), despite the government telling us every day that it is delivering it.

We are short of suitable eye protection visors. What we have currently are safety glasses that are less robust than a Christmas cracker hat, don’t supply adequate coverage and fall off every time you bend over.

Not only are doctors working every hour available, day and night, but many are now working outwith their area of expertise, in unfamiliar surrounds and with people they do not know.

It’s scary, it’s stressful and it’s unrelenting.

The hospital has different zones – red, amber and green – and all of ICU is red. That means wearing full PPE – as much as we have available – before entering.

All medical and nursing staff have to wear full PPE throughout their shift, only removing the masks, glasses and gowns for short comfort breaks.

A number of staff are now suffering from skin breakouts across their hands and face from constant washing and the gloves.

The constant flow of Covid patients has meant our team has become well honed.

Like everywhere else in the world, we see more men than women – in ICU it’s twice as many – and the highest death rate is among men over 70. The patients always present the same, unwell for a week to 10 days, worse today with shortness of breath and profound hypoxia, and they all test positive for Covid.

Our approach is the same, sleep, tube ventilate.

And hope.

In a weekly dispatch, an intensive care doctor charts the brutal reality of NHS Scotland’s war against Covid-19.