Intensive care unit manager provides

Intensive care unit manager provides harrowing insight into life on the frontlines

At this morning’s COVID-19 press conference, nurse Michelle Dowd, who works as the manager of the intensive care unit at Liverpool Hospital, shared her insight into what it’s like working on the frontlines of the health response during the pandemic.

Ms Dowd detailed just how sick patients are becoming with COVID-19, and the emotional toll treating them has taken on staff and families.

We have published the full transcript of her media conference below, or you can watch that specific segment from the press conference at the top of the page.

Nurse Michelle Dowd has revealed harrowing insight into what it’s like working on the frontlines during the pandemic. (9News)

My name is Michelle Dowd and I’m the nurse manager at intensive care for Liverpool Hospital.

I’m here with you today to share what it’s like for intensive care nurses on the frontline during this pandemic response and to encourage you all to please get vaccinated.

Intensive care units in hospitals are where we look after our sickest, most vulnerable patients.

We work in a large team of health professionals and support staff to look after the sickest patients in the hospital, these are patients who have been victims of trauma, patients who have had strokes, cardiac arrest, major surgery.

To keep everyone safe in our intensive care unit right now, we’ve essentially divided it so we can keep the COVID and non-COVID patients separate and protect the most vulnerable.

The Delta variant is just that contagious, and that’s why vaccination is so very important.

Intensive care patients need one-on-one nursing care.

They need to be monitored really closely so that we can respond immediately in case they deteriorate.

If you or your loved one is in intensive care right now for any reason, you may not be able to have visitors.

We know it’s really hard at the moment to be separated from your support network but the amount of virus that’s circulating in the community just poses too much risk to our patients.

For our COVID ICU patients, they can’t have visitors at all.

Every day, we’re communicating with families over the phone and by video call to connect them.

In the worst cases, at the end of life, we’ll connect a call with the family and hold the patient’s hands and provide as much care and comfort and support as we possibly can.

We know this is really hard for families.

This is really hard for us as well.

We normally work really closely with our families at the bedside when we look after our intensive care patients but looking after COVID patients is not just emotionally hard for intensive care nurses.

It’s physically really hard work as well.

A respiratory therapist treats a COVID-19 patient in a NCH Healthcare System's ICU on August 9 in Naples, Florida. (Andrew West/Fort Meyers News-Press/USA Today Network) — Patients in the ICU are so severely ill, they’re not allowed to have any visitors at all. (Supplied)

These patients are some of the sickest we’ve ever seen

They require so much support and monitoring and physical care.

We’re in layers of PPE, sometimes for hours at a time.

This is really physically hard work.

While our intensive care units are busy and stretched at the moment, we do work in a broader NSW ICU network and we can share the load to some degrees but we really need your hope to stop the spread and keep people out of hospital and out of intensive care.

The Delta variant is so contagious that we have entire family groups in our hospital in some really tragic circumstances.

We’ve had parents, both parents of young children so sick that they need to be ventilated in our intensive care unit and separated from their children.

Sometimes, they don’t have extended family to look after these children, or the extended family is so sick that we need to make alternative care arrangements.