As the Covid pandemic reaches its peak, nearly half of intensive care staff are suffering from trauma. Who is caring for the carers?
On a dark evening in April, a month into the UK’s first coronavirus lockdown, I joined a shift for the 24/7 text support service Shout 85258. Sitting in my kitchen, I had been given permission to observe its volunteers at work (all connected to the same Zoom session) as they held real-time text conversations with frontline NHS workers. For the previous few weeks, the volunteers – all members of the public – had been talking to doctors, nurses, paramedics and others as they did their best to manage the pandemic’s shocking first wave.
“We’ve had people texting in saying, ‘I’m not sure if I’m in a crisis, but I have had panic attacks,’” Shout’s clinical director, Sarah Kendrick, told me. Our conversation was punctuated by frequent beeps as new messages arrived, most during NHS shift turnover times. A nurse on the bus into work would text to say he was frightened to go in; an exhausted consultant at the end of her shift would offload about watching yet another patient die. There were many messages from distressed paramedics.
