Dame Ruth May, England’s former chief nurse, has testified at the Covid inquiry that the country’s nurses bore the brunt of the pandemic, faced with inadequate protective equipment and low staffing levels. She revealed that the National Health Service (NHS) had been understaffed in 2020 because of the catastrophic decision to reduce financial support for student nurses in 2015. The resource shortage was especially challenging in intensive care and affected the care of some Covid patients. In March 2020, a plastic gown shortage left front-line nurses in fear of contracting the virus.
Dame Ruth appeared at Downing Street news conferences and also volunteered for nursing shifts during the pandemic. She said that they were dealing with some extraordinarily difficult decisions when the pandemic hit in early 2020. There was a vast and sudden increase in cases and deaths, and the environment was fast-moving.
According to Dame Ruth, about 40,000 nursing and midwifery vacancies existed in England when the pandemic began. A catastrophic decision in 2015 to convert the grant or bursary paid to student midwives and nurses to loans had resulted in roughly 5,000 fewer trainees in England by 2020. This reduction had made a difference during the pandemic – there would have been less burnout and less of a psychological impact.
The pandemic’s critical care pressure led to specialist critical-care nurses being in charge of up to six patients each instead of the typical one-to-one ratio. According to Dame Ruth, this affected the patients’ care quality, which was not where the industry wanted to be, and there were consequences as a result.
The Covid inquiry is taking evidence about the impact on the NHS and healthcare systems throughout the UK, where more than 50 witnesses are expected to appear in this third module, which runs until the end of November
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