Rachel Clarke: ‘NHS staff are burning with frustration and grief at this second wave’
The palliative care doctor and author on a year of Covid in UK hospitals and her hopes for the vaccine
You wrote Breathtaking towards the start of the pandemic when you couldn't sleep. Did you envisage that the world would still be looking the way it does almost a year later?
No, I truly did not. I started writing the book as a forlorn kind of nocturnal therapy at a time when cases were going down, it was midsummer, there was hope and optimism in the air. And although I was sure there would be a resurgence, never for one second did I imagine this, with the deaths worse than they have ever been. It's just shattering.
How does what you are seeing inside hospitals today differ from what you saw last spring?
In the first wave, the NHS threw all it had at trying to manage Covid, so everything else shut down. This time, the NHS has been desperately trying to catch up on all the other non-Covid activity that was suspended, so staff have gone into the second wave already exhausted. Many staff are suffering from clinical depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder. I've seen colleagues break down in tears in the hospital. We are also seeing younger patients, which is shocking. The most soul-destroying aspect of this second wave is to a very large extent this could have been prevented. Staff are just burning with frustration and grief.