Covid inquiry: nurses battled ‘scenes from hell’ on wards

Professor Kevin Fong, former clinical adviser in emergency preparedness, resilience and response at NHS England, said that treating patients during the pandemic was like responding to a daily terror attack.

“It really was like nothing else I have ever seen and certainly like nothing else those teams had ever seen”

Kevin Fong

The comments came as part of Professor Fong’s evidence to Module 3 of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry yesterday.

Between summer 2020 to July 2021, Professor Fong organised and led a programme of visits across hospitals that were experiencing severe pressure during the pandemic.

He told the inquiry that the scale of death being seen by intensive care unit (ICU) nurses “was unlike anything they had ever seen before”.

Staff told Professor Fong during the visits that “it would be routine to see three to five deaths a day”.

Meanwhile, one hospital had 10 deaths on one shift, two of whom were their own staff.

“We had nurses talking about patients raining from the sky,” he added.

Professor Fong recounted how nurses told him they had “got tired of putting people in body bags”.

He said: “We went to another unit where things got so bad, they were so short of resources, they ran out of body bags and they were instead issued with nine-foot clear plastic sacks and cable ties.

“Those nurses talk about being really traumatised by that because they had recurring nightmares about feeling like they were just throwing bodies away.”

While ICU nurses are used to seeing death, Professor Fong said their experience during the pandemic was “indescribable”.

“It really was like nothing else I have ever seen and certainly like nothing else those teams had ever seen in their experience – it was incredibly difficult,” he added.

Professor Fong served in a clinical role during several major civilian incidents, including the 7/7 London bombings.

However, he said that nothing he had witnessed during these events “was as bad as Covid was every single day” for staff.

One intensive care registrar told Professor Fong at the time that working on hospital wards during the pandemic was “like a terrorist attack every day” and that they did not know “when the attacks are going to stop”.

“Never again can we fail to properly resource and protect our vital profession”

Nicola Ranger

Meanwhile, Professor Fong also described nurses working beyond capacity on busy wards flooded with Covid-19-positive patients.

At one hospital, specialist ICU nurses were covering four or six patients at one time.

The former chief nursing officer for England, Dame Ruth May, said in her evidence to the inquiry last week that the decision to increase nurse to patient ratios from 1:1 to 1:6 would stay with her forever.

Professor Fong said: “I remember in another hospital the nurses telling me that all you have time to do is to manage the alarms; you’re not managing the patients.

“The alarms are going off constantly – the syringe drivers, the ventilators, the beds, whatever you’ve got, the oxygen, and you’re putting out fires rather than caring for the patient.”

He recalled that sometimes there were so few staff that nurses had chosen to use patient commodes or wear adult nappies “because there was literally no one to give them a toilet break and take over their nursing duties”.

“It was a scene from hell,” Professor Fong described.

“This was a hospital bursting at the seams.”

The Royal College of Nursing general secretary and chief executive, Professor Nicola Ranger, said Professor Fong’s evidence “profoundly captures the relentless devastation nursing staff faced during the pandemic”.

Nicola Ranger

“Despite trying to give patients the best care, they faced an almost unimaginable scale of death in a health and care system which was completely overwhelmed,” she said.

“A lack of preparedness exposed nursing staff to a dangerous disease and severe trauma, forcing them to risk their own health trying to hold together services racked by widespread staff shortages.”

Professor Ranger argued that nursing staff were left to work in a health service “that wasn’t resourced or staffed to deal with the crisis”.

She added: “The voices of nursing professionals are finally being heard at the Covid-19 inquiry, but this must also result in action.

“Never again can we fail to properly resource and protect our vital profession.”

The UK Covid-19 Inquiry continues.