Bearing witness to a pandemic BUPA | SANITAS
At times, it all seemed like a maze maría casas Nurse Sanitas 24 hours Sanitas Healthcare Funding
I work attending urgent phone calls. The pandemic hasn’t been the same for me as for those who work directly with patients. We have offered a service for families who can’t go into the hospitals or patients being managed at home because the hospitals have been full. Everyone in our service was sent to work from home and we were provided with laptops and we continued to provide our 24-hour urgent telephone service. It was usually more about fear than symptoms: I travelled, or I was in contact with someone who travelled; I went to Italy … We would advise our patients that unless they had serious symptoms such as breathlessness or fever, that they should stay at home. We also asked them to quarantine as much as possible. The worst thing was when healthcare staff got Covid. It got more complicated then. There weren’t the medical teams to look after patients, and nowhere to refer them to. Field hospitals were even set up, because the current hospitals weren’t coping. Soon, new teams were set up to support people who had coronavirus at home.
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