One of the country’s most senior doctors broke down in tears several times as he recalled “scenes from hell” inside intensive care units during the COVID-19 pandemic, a public inquiry has heard.
Professor Kevin Fong, who was tasked with helping to direct an emergency response to the crisis, said staff were running out of body bags and there were dying patients “raining from the sky”.
“The scale of death experienced by intensive care teams during COVID was unlike anything they had ever seen before,” he told the UK COVID-19 Inquiry.
“They’re no strangers to death. They look after some of the sickest patients in the hospital, but the scale of death was truly, truly astounding.
“I worked on a shift where we had six deaths in a single shift. Another hospital told us that they had 10 deaths on a shift, two of whom were their own staff.
“We had nurses talking about patients raining from the sky, where one of the nurses told me they just got tired of putting people in body bags.
“[One hospital] said that sometimes they were so overwhelmed that they were putting patients in body bags, lifting them from the bed, putting them on the floor, and putting another patient in that bed straight away because there wasn’t time.
“We went to another hospital where things got so bad, they were so short of resource, that they ran out of body bags, and they were instead issued with 9ft clear plastic sacks and cable ties.”
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Professor Fong broke down in tears several times and was forced to pause to recompose himself as he gave a harrowing account of the crisis.
The former national clinical adviser in emergency preparedness, resilience and response at NHS England described the trauma for families and staff, as patients were forced to die alone without their loved ones by their bedside.
“Many of the patients’ families understandably wanted to be present virtually at the end, when visiting was difficult or wasn’t allowed. And every single unit we went to, the nurses talked about the difficulty of that for them.
Families ‘howling down the phone’
“At exactly the time when you would recuse yourself to give the patient and their family some dignity, you are actually holding a phone or an iPad up, showing them the monitor, showing the family the patient, listening to the family imploring the patient not to die.
“And then the howling down the phone and with nothing else that you can do other than to stay there and to be entrained into that grief. There wasn’t a single nurse I spoke to who didn’t talk about how traumatic that was.”
‘Like a terrorist attack every day’
He said at one hospital nurses resorted to wearing adult nappies because they were so stretched they could not take toilet breaks. Others went to buy visors for their own protective equipment.
Prof Fong also told the inquiry he undertook an informal visit to one of the “hardest hit” intensive care units in the country where he was told by a senior registrar: “It’s been like a terrorist attack every day since it started, and we don’t know when the attacks are going to stop’.”
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Prof Fong said the experience for NHS staff on the front line in intensive care was “indescribable” and there were units where 70% of patients died.
During one visit in late December 2020, Prof Fong said he was at a hospital with a medium-sized unit. “I’ll never forget it,” he said.
Nurses wearing adult diapers
“It was a scene from hell. There were so few staff that some of the nurses had chosen to either use the patient commodes in the side rooms, and some of the nurses had chosen to wear adult diapers because there was literally no one to give them a toilet break and take over their nursing duties.”
Prof Fong told how one patient died in an ambulance because they could not get into the hospital, while other patients could not be intubated as there was no room or staff and ICU was full.
Several people in the public seating area wiped away tears during Prof Fong’s testimony. The UK COVID-19 Inquiry continues.