The talk is all about recovery. How does a hospital, a service, “recover”? It is hard — we are still busy.
First we need to breathe. Not too many meetings. Most of us need to come up to the surface before going back underwater.
But before recovery, can we count the damage? Hospitals are like termite hills full of workers — thousands individually and millions nationally.
We are frankly standing still wondering what the hell just hit us — as if a tsunami has just crashed through. We are looking at the destruction and counting the wounded.
And us medics? We’ve mostly had it. My colleagues were dropping daily in March. Some won’t come back or have been in ICU so long that they are pessimistic.
So here we are heading into recovery mode. Recovery plans are good management; get ready for what happens next.
And what about the rest? The forgotten? My patients who got sidelined?
Chemo: stopped. Radiotherapy: delayed. The patients who need scans, tests, procedures. As the Covid-blast ripped through, all our management of complex cancer was delayed or put in the bin.
There are two costs to that.
There is the actual delay in treatment that might appear in the yearly statistics.
Then there is another bad thing: the feeling that you are losing a chance to keep patients alive because, at the beginning, we were all over the place.
Lots died this month of non-Covid reasons. We will get back on it, but we could have done better.
