On the 70th birthday of the NHS, the Guardian is reporting from King’s College hospital, south London, to tell stories from the frontline
Let’s end this blog with a reminder of the words of 15-year-old Freya Lewis, who underwent 13 operations and more than 70 hours of surgery after being seriously injured in last year’s Manchester Arena bombing.
Freya said of her time in Manchester’s children’s hospital, where staff helped her to walk again: “The NHS saved my life and got me back to normal. The NHS is the best thing in the world.”
Bonnerjea, 88, started volunteering at King’s College hospital after her husband, Rene, died aged 96. He had been treated at the hospital, and Bonnerjea says she was inspired to volunteer after seeing how hard the doctors and nurses worked.
“When I took my husband here every week the staff were so nice and kind. They went out of their way to help, but they were very overworked, so it inspired me to try to help,” she says.
Bonnerjea now spends one day a week helping in haematology and A&E. “It’s nice to feel a wee bit useful,” she says, adding that her daily jobs include helping out with administrative tasks, making tea and coffee for patients and directing people to various places in the hospital if they are lost.
The sprightly 88-year-old also talks to patients, lending a listening ear. “I remember one old lady and I felt very happy about helping her,” she says, a smile spreading across her face.
“She had very high blood pressure and no one could bring it down. I went in and started asking her questions and she told me about her family history her life ... As she was talking her blood pressure went down and down and down.
“I just sat there listening as she was talking ... I think she just needed to relax. She lived on her own and had bottled up a lot of things. She must have been over 70. The doctors were really happy that I could help out.”
I was here for the two terror attacks, when I was a junior I was there for the Admiral Duncan bombing. You see the devastation people can inflict on other people. But it goes back to why you come into the job, to help people, and the satisfaction is seeing how you work together as a multi-discipline team.
Gabriel has spent the day doing scans himself as well as preparing staff for an expert panel.
At the moment one of the major challenges is staffing, persuading our junior colleagues to stay with us, stay engaged with the job, but the market forces, the pressure of the job and the cost of living in London can have a huge impact.
As part of today’s celebrations we’re hearing from people who volunteer for the NHS. Sadie Lennox, 17, volunteers on the oncology ward of Wansbeck general hospital, and tells us what it means to her.
I’m a sixth-form student at King Edwards VI school in Morpeth and I’m interested in working in healthcare. We were offered volunteering as part of enrichment by HelpForce and I’ve been helping out since February. The experience has been really good.
I spend time with patients on the oncology ward, helping with tea and coffee and keeping them company. There are often difficult moments and that’s why we’re there. It’s the people who don’t have any visitors that struggle the most so it’s nice that we can be there for them even if it’s only for a few hours. We don’t talk about anything in particular. We just let the time pass and keep them company.
One memory that stands out is when we met one patient named Susan. It was probably after a couple of shifts that me and the other girls met her. We struck up a friendship and we’d see her every week after school. It was nice to form a relationship and for her to see familiar faces when we’d visit.
The NHS means a lot to me, my family and friends. I think it’s really comforting to know that we’re helping those who have a condition that has touched most people in one way or another. It’s nice to be able to help care for them and to have the opportunity to do so as such a young age.
McEnroe, 31, is responsible for making sure the emergency department has all the equipment it needs and within the hospital’s budget. He is also responsible for delivering the four-hour wait target, which means people have to be admitted, transferred or discharged at A&E within four hours.
McEnroe says that the biggest challenge is the growing numbers depending on emergency departments, with people dealing with conditions they would not have survived decades ago. “Also the ageing profile of patients coming to us now are people who are living longer and managing conditions for longer. That is a challenge,” he says.
Another big concern for McEnroe is staffing. “There are not enough emergency practitioners and nurses on wards to ... sustain quality of services in the best way possible. And if we are struggling to attract those kinds of people at King’s then that’s a concern.”
It’s afternoon in the paediatric liver ward at King’s College hospital and Jude, eight, is recovering from having five organs transplanted.
“I have got a new stomach, pancreas, liver, small and large bowel,” he says, listing off body parts like a shopping list.
The operation was a month ago and Jude says he feels much better now, although he has been struggling since going onto solid foods. Jude had intestinal failure, which was managed through IV nutrition. He has been fed into his heart for six years.
“It’s been challenging because he has never been able to eat and drink,” his mother Kellie explains.
She adds: “Intestinal failure is not common but can be managed with IV nutrition, not all children need the level of support Jude needed.”
The eight-year-old is one of only 20 children at King’s to have had a multivisceral transplant.
The first thing Jude ate after surgery was a digestive biscuit and his list of favourite foods now ranges from baked beans to oreos.
The nurse who has been looking after him is Sarah White, 25, who works in a ward looking after children with liver conditions.
I love kids ... I would never want to work in an adult ward. I guess the reason I enjoy it is something about fixing people. Taking them from experiencing their worst day to sending them home to grow up and have a great life.
We get lots of long-term patients here and when you work intensively with someone for months you can get quite attached. There are several who we still keep in touch with as a ward. Even if they are cured they still send us photos and updates.
To be a good nurse, you have to love it, you have to be patient and show compassion. I always say I don’t know what I would do if wasn’t doing this, there is nothing else I would want to do.
Incoming patient ...
When a helicopter lands on the helipad high above the King’s College hospital, doctors have around a 20-minute warning to prepare for the patient.
When one helicopter arrives from Kent on Thursday afternoon, the rush of the propellers is quite a force.
When the air ambulance flies in, it’s been in the air for just 20 minutes, having spent around 30 minutes stabilising the patient, and then they continue performing treatment en route to the hospital.
Hasan is in a contemplative mood. She has spent the day with junior doctors, who have been presenting their new innovations for patient care.
“The NHS’s birthday had made me feel very reflective. But being with those doctors today has been wonderful, they are the bright future of this health service.”
Her ward cares for elderly patients, often frail and with multiple and complex problems including dementia and delirium.
“I just love the patients, it is just such rewarding medicine. I have gravitated towards the really unwell patients because there is more time to spend with them and their families.”
Hasan spends some of her time visiting patients at home, which she says gives invaluable insight into their care.
“Seeing someone in their own space, with their things around them, that is so important to understand them as a human being,” she says.
One patient particularly sticks in her mind. “She was about to get in an ambulance and she said she had to be sprayed with Estée Lauder perfume before she could go. She said she needed it for luck, she couldn’t go out without it. So of course you do that.”
Graham, 57, has worked for the NHS in administrative roles for over two decades and in that time she has seen how much it has changed.
The NHS has become more economical rather than focusing on patients and valuing them, which is sad. It’s now more about box-ticking exercises and we have lost the essence of why the NHS was created in the first place.
There are financial worries in the system and there is a lot of burden on the service ... The pressures are from the external bodies but they impact on the day-to-day.
Graham now works as an administrator helping out specialist midwives at King’s College hospital. Her role involves making urgent appointments for pregnant women who need immediate care. She is also responsible for organising sickle cell results and appointments.
Beyond that, Graham is also a union representative and a Speak Up ambassador - the latter role means staff go to her with issues that she then brings up with senior managers.
Staff morale in the NHS has been affected in recent years ... Morale is low because we have moved away from the people ... It’s a domino effect everyone feels under pressure so it works itself down.
If colleagues come to me with a problem I always encourage them to speak, but not everyone has that in them - that is why I do what I do, sometimes we have to be the voice for our colleagues ... support is key.
Best is one of the brains behind a state-of-the-art critical care centre. It will be the biggest of its kind in Europe by some margin.
“It’s a massive project, 10 years in the making,” he says. The new unit is still a few weeks from being opened, but Best says as much thought has gone into the design as the equipment, with mounting evidence about how important environment is to recovery.
The rooms have floor-to-ceiling windows with views of the park, and the palette of colours in the room has been specially designed to co-ordinate with the trees and the seasons.
“When patients are in critical care, there is a toll on their mental health, they can hallucinate, experience delirium, severe agitation, nightmares. Some have hallucinations about ceiling tiles, so we’ve made sure we’ve removed them, the ceilings are a calm shade of blue.”
At the end of the bed, families can plug in a patient’s playlist.
“If a patient would normally listen to Radio 4, putting it on in the background can make such a difference to recovery.”
When he was growing up, Cheyette wanted to be a chef.
“I loved food but I also loved science. And my teacher at school mentioned to me that I could become a dietician. I’d never even heard of it at the time. But it’s exactly the right combination because I really also like the therapeutic side.”
He has worked in the NHS for 18 years and his patients are mainly people with Type 1 diabetes, for whom he has developed an app and published a book to help people work on their carb intake, and the related amount of insulin.
It can be a real burden on some people to accurately measure every meal. Some people finder it harder to cope, especially if they are starting university or maybe have a relationship breakdown, or just find the process really difficult.
You do build a rapport with patients that you see over a number of years because Type 1 is a life-long condition. And one of the most challenging things is seeing people in their 20s and 30s who maybe didn’t manage their condition as well in their teens and now are experiencing complications, which is very tough but inevitable.
If you haven’t seen it yet, we’ve got a gripping series of interviews with staff on the giddy highs and lows that come with working in the NHS. Doctors, nurses, porters and therapists share their stories:
Fifteen-year-old Freya Lewis bravely stood up to speak at today’s service for NHS staff at Westminster Abbey.
Freya is a schoolgirl from Cheshire who was grievously injured in the Manchester Arena bomb in May 2017, which also claimed the life of her friend Nell Jones, her companion that night enjoying the music of Ariana Grande.
As she told today’s throng of politicians, NHS staff, religious leaders and fellow NHS patients: “I suffered 29 separate injuries, including a broken arm, two broken legs, severe burns, facial and internal injuries.
“There wasn’t any part of my body that hadn’t suffered the effects of shrapnel. My injuries were like those you would see from a battlefield in a war zone. I have now been in surgery on 13 occasions and for a total of over 70 hours.”
Freya was there today with her parents, Nick and Alison, sister Georgia and also Jenny Grant, a nurse in the paediatric critical care unit at Manchester Royal children’s hospital, where she spent five weeks being treated, and whose staff have done a visibly amazing job.
“What has the NHS done for me? The NHS saved my life. It got me back to normal; it got me back together. I’m good; I’m doing well. The NHS is the best thing in the world,” Freya told me.
Freya was in a wheelchair for months but is now mobile again and last month did the Manchester Run to raise money for the hospital. She and her family have so far raised £58,000 for the hospital, which is the NHS’s busiest children’s hospital, treating 260,000 young patients a year.
“A lot of that £58,000 is to buy pillows, bedding and other things to help make parents’ stay at the hospital more comfortable,” Grant explained.
Freya’s dad said they identified that as a priority – to improve the experience of parents, who often spend weeks at a time there tending their child – after he, Alison and Georgia last year had to sleep on chairs, “which were horrendous”.
