Among the household names featured on the new year honours list, you’ll find hundreds of key workers and community champions who stepped up during the pandemic and made a huge individual impact.
Here, we meet two of them: a child and adolescent psychiatrist and a pub general manager who, thanks to their innovative thinking, enriched the lives of those in their community – and beyond.
‘My colleague said I was making history, but I just laughed’
“During the pandemic, people Zoomed, Skyped and connected with families digitally, so why can’t we connect healthcare the same way,” asks consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist Prof Alka Surajprakash Ahuja, from Cardiff, who was awarded an MBE for her services to the NHS during Covid-19. Ahuja received the honour for her pivotal role in setting up the pioneering NHS Wales Video Consulting Service, which digitally connects patients with clinicians.
As clinical lead for Technology Enabled Care Cymru, she was tasked last March with rapidly scaling up the service to enable people to access healthcare advice and services from their homes during the pandemic. The service would not only protect the public, but the NHS workforce too. “A lot of people were self-isolating or [Covid-19] positive but needed to continue providing primary and secondary care, as well as in care homes,” she says. Under normal circumstances, it would have taken at least two years to implement the technology. But the pandemic meant the situation was urgent. “It needed to happen within weeks,” says Ahuja.
Within just six weeks, the programme had been rolled out to almost 90% of primary care, with Ahuja’s team developing and issuing best practice guidance and toolkits. “This meant people could continue to consult their GP and get the support they needed,” she says. As well as improving patient accessibility and choice, the introduction of video consultations has been shown to reduce travel time, costs and the carbon footprint of both clinicians and patients.
Working remotely with a newly-assembled team, Ahuja was able to bring the programme to hospitals as well as GP surgeries. “This meant all the outpatient appointments could continue to happen [covering] intensive care, hospices, oncology wards, mental health units. But I never thought I’d be connecting patients on the Covid ward in intensive care with their families – sometimes to say the final goodbye. I think that’s the thing that really hit me,” she says. In 12 weeks, the programme was available across more than 50 services and 35 specialties in Wales. Almost 100,000 virtual consultations have now taken place, with 93% rating it as “excellent, really good or good”.
The programme’s success means the focus was extended to care homes, too. “That was a place where we had the most vulnerable people who needed help, but professionals were very limited in terms of access. It allowed GPs to do virtual rounds, continuing to provide the support and care they needed.” Dentistry, optometry and pharmacy followed, with video appointments revolutionising the way a growing number of patients accessed healthcare. Ahuja’s research into video appointments also led her to investigate their value for schools. “We know schools are not going to be the same for a long, long time. But children and young people still need support for their mental and physical health, so that will hopefully enable remote delivery of care into school settings,” she says.
The technology has proved life-changing. “One of our first patients was an elderly gentleman living on his own. He had an appointment with the oncologist – it was a newly diagnosed tumour that was probably cancerous. He was very anxious, which was understandable. What helped was his daughter in London and his son in Singapore could join the appointment virtually, which under normal circumstances wouldn’t be possible. It meant having family for the appointment was much more reassuring and helped contain his anxiety. When we spoke to him, he was in tears. He said: ‘My god, I just couldn’t believe it – it was like my daughter and son sitting next to me in the appointment.’”
Despite the punishing workload, witnessing the results has made it worthwhile. “I think one thing that kept us going was that we all believed this was going to make a difference,” she says. “I still remember the day I left my clinical job – it was hard because I thought I’m not going to see my patients and it’s going to be next to impossible. My colleague said: ‘Don’t worry, you’re making history’ and I laughed. Now, I think what we have done has been amazing. Post-Covid, healthcare is not going to be the same – it’s going to change the landscape.”
‘I needed to feel like I had a purpose in the community’
As general manager of the Portsmouth Arms in Basingstoke, Richard Curtis was awarded a BEM for services to charity and the community in Hampshire during the pandemic. At the time of the announcement, he had raised £52,500 for charity through the virtual pub quizzes he has hosted on Facebook since the outbreak of the pandemic. With a modest goal of £150, his first quiz – which began the day after pubs closed last March – quickly gained traction, turning into a nightly occurrence. “I never expected it to be anything other than my regulars who come to the pub, and to maybe attract a bit of a local audience,” he says. “We didn’t expect it to go worldwide.”
Curtis, who estimates he’s now held around 300 online quizzes since March and is still going strong, has seen his efforts bring together people from around the globe in a bid to help alleviate loneliness and isolation. With the first quiz drawing around 120 participants, at its peak up to 1,500 people were joining online.
“From March, it very quickly went from one quiz a week to 18,” he says. “We were doing a children’s one Monday to Friday, which I hosted with my children. I was then doing an adult one every night, and then on Saturday and Sunday I did a themed quiz at three o’clock, another at five, then an adults’ one at eight.”
With each quiz filmed inside the pub (Curtis lives upstairs with his wife and three children) it offered “the feel of the pub” for those missing it. “I made a rule that if people couldn’t come to the pub, I wouldn’t be drinking, but that soon turned into people saying: ‘If we donate £200, will you have a beer?’”
The biggest quiz – a world record attempt held across VE Day weekend that lasted an astonishing 35 hours – raised more than £21,000 for charity (the world record status is still pending). “The money we raised was beyond anybody’s belief. That weekend there was so much hope for what people could have done, and what they were actually allowed to do,” he says of the weekend, falling during the first national lockdown.
The world record attempt was surprisingly gruelling, he says. “I just imagined I’d have to write loads of questions and stay awake. But sitting in that position for so long, my back was shot to pieces. And while staying awake for so long isn’t a problem, constantly talking for that amount of time is. Because I’d been talking for so long, my throat and tongue had swollen up so much that I couldn’t eat. I tried to eat a bacon sandwich at one point and choked, I just couldn’t swallow it.”
While the recognition for his efforts has been overwhelming, Curtis says doing nothing wasn’t an option. “I started doing it because I still needed to feel like I had a purpose in the community, even with the pub shut – it was a really scary time,” he says. That same community, it appears, is fully behind him. “The day after the [record-attempting] quiz I saw a few people rustling around the car park. I wandered down in my pyjamas and before I knew it, there were 50 or so people – all socially distanced – clapping. The fact we’ve genuinely had an impact on people’s lives is amazing.”
This advertiser content was paid for by the UK government. All together (Fight Covid-19) is a government-backed initiative tasked with informing the UK about the Covid-19 pandemic. For more information, visit gov.uk/coronavirus. For more information on honours recipients, go to gov.uk/honours.
from Lifestyle | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3noWwpC
via IFTTT
comment 0 Comment
more_vert