Nursing in Practice May/June 2020 (issue 114) | Page 20

Coronavirus:
changing the
face of nursing
Covid-19 has placed immense pressure on
nurses. Mimi Launder examines what awaits
the other side of the crisis
DANIEL MITCHELL
L
ife has altered dramatically for the people in the UK
since Covid-19 reached these shores at the end of
January. Cases rose in February, the fi rst death was
recorded on 5 March, and the Government imposed
a lockdown on 23 March. Life as we know it has been turned
upside down – not least for healthcare professionals.
Over the course of a few weeks, nursing has been
transformed. Community and practice nurses have been
redeployed to roles where they have had to employ new or
rarely used skills. Some nurses who had never triaged or
carried out remote consultations suddenly found NHS
England advising them to do so. Medical staff started going
to their jobs knowing they were risking their lives. Nurses
have been sent to the front line too often without the proper
protective equipment, and many have died doing jobs they’ve
dedicated their lives to. Just over half (51%) of 4,446 nursing
staff working in high-risk environments, including with
Covid-19 patients, surveyed by the Royal College of Nursing
in April said they felt pressured to reuse single-use personal
protective equipment (PPE).
Rallying in the face of adversity
The NHS, often criticised as slow to adapt, has moved at
startling speeds to cope with the pandemic. In just over
three weeks the fi rst fi ve of seven emergency ‘Nightingale
Hospitals’ were built – the initial one in East London’s ExCel
Exhibition Centre in just nine days. ‘Hot hubs’ run by general
practice staff have sprung up around the country, where
healthcare professionals are able to clinically diagnose and
advise symptomatic Covid-19 patients face to face who are
not in hospital.
By 17 April, 10,823 nurses and midwives who had left
the profession up to fi ve years ago, and overseas registrants,
had joined the Nursing and Midwifery Council’s emergency
register to help tackle the pandemic. Health Education
England announced that by 17 April nearly 19,500 student
nurses and midwives from universities had signed up to help.
Students in the last six months of their courses were told they
could complete the remainder of their training as a paid
placement, and second- and fi nal-year students not in their
last six months were able to choose to spend 80% of their
hours in a paid clinical placement.
But when coronavirus arrived, there were already nearly
40,000 nursing vacancies in the NHS in England. This
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