A critical care nurse who shared a tearful video of herself urging people to stop panic-buying food at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed she is considering leaving the profession.
In the footage circulated on social media in March last year, Dawn Bilbrough, from York, made a heartfelt plea for shoppers to stop stockpiling after being unable to find fruit or vegetables at a supermarket following a 48-hour shift.
Reflecting on the moment a year later, Ms Bilbrough said it was âdifficult to hear and to seeâ and that the video showed her at âone of my lowest pointsâ.
She told BBC Radio 4âs The World This Weekend that working in critical care during the pandemic had been ârelentless, incredibly traumatic, physically and emotionally exhaustingâ.
Ms Bilbrough described building a bond with her long-term patients, saying health workers have had to carry the âgreat burdenâ of witnessing lives being lost.
âWeâre at the patientâs bedside 12 hours a day and they havenât had their families, they havenât had that usual psychological support that they would receive from their family, so weâve been their everything really,â she told the BBC.
âOf course, theyâve been with us for a much longer period of time than what we would ordinarily have with a patient within intensive care for.
âWeâve got to know them as people, their likes, their dislikes, their dreams, theyâve talked about their families.
âThen, of course, theyâve become really unwell and theyâve been placed on ventilators, and quite often they havenât got through that and thatâs been really difficult because, personally, Iâve felt a bond to all of my patients and to witness them not progress as we would wish, thatâs really, really hard.â
Ms Bilbrough recalled once finishing a shift at 8pm after caring for a âpodâ of four Covid patients, only to return the next day to find all had died and been replaced with different people.
Burden
âWe were kind of facing that quite often and thatâs just unheard of, and thatâs a great burden,â she added.
Ms Bilbrough said that in the âlast waveâ of Covid infections she was seeing âmore die than go into the wardsâ.
She said fewer patients were now coming into hospital with acute Covid, but many patients were still going through rehabilitation or remaining on ventilation â including those aged in their 50s.
Ms Bilbrough, who started her training 20 years ago, admitted she never would have imagined having to deal with something like the pandemic.
Asked if she had considered leaving her profession in the last year, she emphasised she and her colleagues had âremained professionalâ but that it was âa human responseâ to reconsider a career after experiencing âhigh levels of stressâ.
She added: âLong-term I am reconsidering my future, I will certainly remain in nursing for the foreseeable, but long-term Iâm not really sure what my plans are going to be.â
In the clip posted online 12 months ago she emotionally described people âjust stripping the shelves of basic foodsâ, fearfully saying: âI just donât know how Iâm supposed to stay healthy.â
âYou just need to stop it, because there are people like me that are going to be looking after you when youâre at your lowest,â she said.
Asked by the BBC if as a nurse she felt more valued now by the public, Ms Bilbrough said there was âso much love for the NHSâ and that people had come to realise âhow highly skilled and knowledgeable critical care nurses areâ.
She hope that the âhuge respectâ for the profession would continue and that people will remember âthe sacrifices and the burdensâ that had been made.
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