‘The sense of the importance of medicine as a vocation came into sharp focus’
During COVID, Northern Ireland GPs committee member Ursula Brennan continued to work as a GP partner in Mount Oriel Medical Practice and was GP lead for Beech Hall COVID Centre in Belfast.
‘I remember the exact meeting where Wuhan and COVID were first mentioned. The date was 21 January 2020. My feeling was that this new infection was so far away, we were unlikely to be affected. How wrong I was.
‘Rapidly, within days, watching the news and scanning emails and websites was essential. There was a fervour for finding out the latest and newest information, but the scale of the new information we were getting almost hourly was overwhelming.
‘Watching the difficult scenes from Italy brought it home to me how vulnerable we might all be, and gave me a sense of needing to be part of the planning for support and solutions to keep general practice open. It may sound overly sentimental or crass, but the sense of the importance of medicine as a vocation and less of a job came into sharp focus for me.
‘Just before lockdown I remember having difficult conversations with my parents about how to keep themselves safe, and sobbing as I drove home, not knowing when it would be safe to hug them again.
‘I remember speaking to a local radio outlet to advise the general public that we were trying to cope as best we could, and calling for the public to respect the health advice – not just for the individual, but for the community and all our families. That sense of nervousness and urgency thankfully nearly feels like a distant memory now.
‘Healthcare in Northern Ireland was fragile even before the pandemic. Waiting lists for care have been the norm for some time, but the pausing of care during the pandemic has definitely caused even more disruption.
Life will never be entirely the same as it was pre-pandemic
‘I believe that general practice demonstrated significant agility during the pandemic, moving to a telephone consulting service literally overnight. Practices working collectively to support the work of the COVID assessment centres ensured that COVID case volumes didn’t overwhelm emergency services. This was unprecedented and there was no road map.
‘But there continues to be a very unhelpful public perception and narrative about GPs post-pandemic. I am clear that we never stopped seeing patients and we have had to adapt and modify our engagement with patients, embracing technology to support and ensure that we can deliver care to as many patients as we can.
‘Recovery means “to regain or return to normal”, but life will never be entirely the same as it was pre-pandemic. The NHS has had to adapt and develop strategies to protect the delivery of care for the public. As a healthcare professional I accept that change is inevitable.
‘We now need to support and care for our current workforce. The response to COVID-19 highlighted that this is essential. I can now see that you can never overprepare for something like this, and you need to remember that those working at the centre of patient care will have solutions and ideas in abundance. Supported autonomy is key.’
‘We relied on dedicated staff to work beyond their hours while terrified of what might happen’
Northern Ireland consultants committee chair David Farren, a microbiologist, was at the forefront of COVID in Northern Ireland.
‘I distinctly remember sitting on New Year’s Eve 2019 scrolling through social media and seeing a tweet from a virologist colleague highlighting a rapidly spreading respiratory infection in China.
‘Throughout January I watched as it spread throughout China and then started to spread across the world. It was on every media outlet and on everyone’s lips, and I started to try to learn as much as I could about this evolving threat. We knew we weren’t ready for what came next, but we worked as a team tirelessly to make things as good as we could in the face of constantly changing data and guidelines.
‘We totally changed how we did even the simplest interventions like attending clinics to ensure that space and ventilation were optimised. We relied on dedicated staff to work beyond their hours while terrified of what might happen – while anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists claimed that we were making it up, denying that people suffered and died on our wards every day. It was the worst period of working I have ever seen, and I still bear the scars.
‘Now with vaccination and treatments we are seeing fewer ill patients with COVID-19, but the focus has shifted away from being better prepared to addressing the waiting lists and “increasing productivity”. There was no period of rest, no material thanks for staff, and seemingly no lessons learned about the state of our healthcare estate. We seem to have forgotten the importance of simple infection control procedures like hand washing and wearing appropriate PPE.
‘Our hospitals are not fit for purpose, and we have lost staff through retirement and burnout. We desperately need a focus on quality and investment in our health service. It starts with valuing staff and building the services we need for the future.’