The NHS and the UK: A Piece of Home

The event I chose to attend was the Mental Health Nursing in COVID-19, a third event of the series called Nursing a Pandemic. This was an interview with two medical professionals, Roland Dix who is a Consultant Nurse in Psychiatric Intensive Care & Secure Recovery at Gloucestershire Health & Care NHS Foundation Trust, and Douglas Hamandishe is a mental health nurse online activist for raising awareness of the lack of PPE and the concerns regarding BAME nurses. This interview was moderated by Catherine Gamble who is the Head of Nursing Education, Practice and Research at South West London & St George’s Mental Health NHS Trust. The focus of this event was to draw attention to the importance of mental health during the pandemic and how these two professionals have experienced and tried their best to accommodate to a changing society. Additionally, what is highlighted throughout is the significance of the male perspective, that mental health nurses and the general public rarely get to hear from male nurses on the pandemic and the impact that it had on them in addition to others. This adds to the theme that this talk discusses which is the vulnerability of everyone, and in this case, mental health workers.

The reason why I chose to do this talk was because this reminded me of what I experienced during the UK’s lockdown last year. Particularly, this talk struck close to home for me as I am from London, UK and I spent the pandemic locked down at home so their references throughout felt incredibly real. The healthcare system in the UK is one of the best in the world and each week when we had the “Clap for the NHS” it made us feel very looked after and that the NHS were trying their best in dealing with the pandemic. Also, the mental health aspect is crucial right now because as we all navigate our way through this new normal, we have to take time for ourselves more so than ever to make sure that we are staying positive. As I reflect on my own experience and this talk, it makes me think of the huge amounts of stress that I felt being in the same place with the same people all being stressed about the same situation – this definitely challenged my health, physically and mentally, but at the end of the day, I was lucky to have family to spend the long lockdown with. The combination of the pandemic and mental health particularly hits hard because I, along with all of you, am supposed to experience the typical college life but instead, have to do online school and am unable to see many friends who remain scattered throughout the globe – things that no one imagined would happen.

I found it very powerful to include different medical perspectives in the sense that Hamandishe focuses on the mental side and also addresses the “fake” news of advice given to patients while Dix focuses on the internal hospital setting as he talks about uniforms and the environment inside the hospital. First, I thought it was interesting to hear both Douglas and Roland’s thoughts about their first reaction to the emergence of COVID in Wuhan, China and the Lombardy region in Italy. I resonated with both of them because at the time when the news first came out of an outbreak in China, I did not think much of it because it seemed so far away that it would not be a huge issue or that it was a relatively small outbreak or that other nations will be able to deal with it themselves when it reaches that location. Hamandishe addresses that there needs to be clearer guidance and advice as there are many false advices given which I think stirs up more fear and issues that affect not only the person but also their support system. To continue, there were constant themes of safety, fear, and guilt – feelings which I believe we all would have felt during this pandemic. I certainly felt these emotions when I contracted COVID again in December, first in March 2020. I felt very lonely, isolated from my family and these feelings put strain on my mental state, since I was feeling poorly while making sure to keep my family safe from not contracting the virus.

Dix also brought up the idea of being human. He discusses how everyone was together throughout this pandemic and that the healthcare workers and the most vulnerable are the ones who suffer the most. This is important to note because individuals realize that the small things in life are important and that we should not take things for granted. I have noticed that COVID has shone a different light in terms of vulnerability and expressing feelings and that everyone is as susceptible to emotion as others. I think that there is no way to escape it, but the key is time and that we should not keep our feelings hidden but rather talk about it. 

As Dix and Hamandishe put it, there are many lessons to be learned from the mistakes made. This was a new medical tragedy that England did not know how to cope with the fast-increasing death toll, reaching one of the worst in the world. But there is good route ahead because the UK has one of the best vaccine drives in the world – good news in the midst of a pandemic. As it reaches almost a year since the “start”, it will be a breath of fresh air when this pandemic draws close to the end, but we must give our gratitude to everyone helping each other, not least the healthcare workers and family.