The peak of the coronavirus outbreak in Ireland might have passed – for now – but for nursing student Aoife Timmons, the effects of working in a hospital during the crisis still linger in her personal life.
“I still have a few friends that don’t want to see me because I’m still working in the hospital”, she says. “They were all very proud [of me], but they wouldn’t want to see you… which is understandable, but it is hard.”
Timmons, a general nursing student, had her first-year placement cut short earlier this year, as Ireland’s coronavirus cases began to rise rapidly and the country retreated into lockdown. Like many other nursing students, Timmons was employed as a healthcare assistant in a hospital to provide additional help to the staff there. The University Times spoke to five of them to try and gain an insight into their experiences on the frontline.
Working on a “COVID ward” in St James’s Hospital, Timmons saw firsthand the sheer unpredictability of the virus: “We did have a number of patients that were asymptomatic. So they were completely fine and it didn’t really affect them… there were a number of patients who had dementia that had covid so they might have had other infections that would be causing delirium anyway and confusion.”
“It was all really a mix. It was very varied on how it affected people.”
Darren May, a first-year nursing student who was employed as a healthcare worker in a Dublin nursing home, said that working during the pandemic took a significant psychological toll on him. Though none of the residents contracted coronavirus, some found the health and safety measures implemented deeply distressing.
With a ban on visitors, some residents “feel their families have abandoned them”, he said.
“We had patients coming to and from hospital and when they came back they had to isolate for two weeks. Obviously that was a precautionary measure, but you would have residents thinking that they’re locked in a cage and they have nowhere to go – their family can’t save them.”
After some shifts, he said, “you’d actually just break down crying, because it’s OK for me because I can leave, I can go home, but they’re stuck in there in the one ward and the only place they can go to is the seats to sit and watch the TV or go back to their room”.
Ciarán Freeman, a student nurse in NUI Galway, said that while “nursing tends to be quite emotionally taxing” in general, the pandemic forced him to become even more resilient and adaptable.
“[The emotional impact] is still very much a thing on our ward even though we’re not dealing with COVID patients. I suppose for me it’s being away from my family and being away from my friends… I’m living in Galway but I’m from Dublin – I’ve had to adapt to a lot of change, I’ve had to learn how to be a bit more resilient [but] I was well able for it. No matter where you are in healthcare, it’s a very emotionally demanding job.”
Dire as the circumstances were, most student nurses accept that the hospitals equipped them as best they could. Aoife Fitzgerald and Eimear Marsh, who are working as healthcare assistants in Naas General Hospital, told this newspaper that a training session on personal protective equipment (PPE) was “really helpful”.
Moreover, help was at hand throughout the hospital – “the nurses and the other care assistants were really good for the first few weeks to really help us out because we didn’t have much experience”, Fitzgerald said. “We were pulled off our second placement so we only have six weeks experience in hospital.”
Freeman said that having an induction session before he started working in University Hospital Galway, which included a coronavirus information pack for healthcare workers, provided valuable information and support.
“A COVID pack was issued to us detailing what occupational health resources we had available to us should we be sick, what to do if we had a symptom, how to self isolate, and then how to keep a proper list of your close contacts”, he said. “So in terms of support, I feel like it’s quite strong for us at the minute. I don’t feel unsupported in terms of risk of covid.”
Several students remarked that the supply of PPE is now more than sufficient, but, according to Timmons, wearing personal protective equipment (PPE), though, is a “nightmare”. “The masks, particularly, started to hurt your nose and behind your ears because they were pulling. There were some that had this plastic elastic that wasn’t very stretchy at all and that would sort of give you a headache.”
Marsh adds that PPE made it more difficult to make patients feel comfortable: “When you go in in the morning it’s always nice to say, ‘hi’, and smile at them but with the mask you can’t see.”
Even at the height of the crisis, hospitals around the country had non-coronavirus patients to attend to as well.
“People still fall, they break hips, they come off motorbikes, people still crash helicopters or aeroplanes – we had that last week”, Freeman said. “These things still happen.”
“That work is still going on”, he added, “but the threat of COVID is still very, very present – the whole thing of it being an asymptomatic spreader means that anyone who spikes a temperature during the course of their treatments – which, you can imagine, is quite a lot of people – need to be treated with COVID precautions.”
Recent spikes in the number of cases – and localised lockdowns in Laois, Offaly and Kildare – raise the question of whether hospitals need to prepare for another influx of coronavirus patients. At the moment, Marsh and Fitzgerald said, Naas General Hospital has very few coronavirus patients.
But healthcare workers around the country aren’t resting on their laurels just yet. Freeman said that “everybody has a little bit of worry about a second wave, whether or not you’re in healthcare. You’re still a human and you still get these gut reactions to death numbers and increased numbers”.
May expressed a similar sentiment: “Everyone in the HSE and in the healthcare profession knows that it’s going to come. We just don’t know when or how quickly.”
