‘I knew I might be making wrong decisions’: Doctors share pandemic experiences at Covid-19 Inquiry

Video screenshot 'Every Story Matters', Covid-19 Inquiry

By Sarah Lowden

As part of the largest public engagement exercise ever undertaken by a UK public inquiry, NHS doctors and other healthcare staff have given in-depth interviews about their experiences of working during the pandemic.

In a film, shared at the Inquiry on Monday, a London GP, named as Dr Lucy, reflects on the early days of the pandemic in January 2020: “All of the things that we had usually done in our practice had to change overnight,

“We were kind of going to work every day, knowing we were being exposed to Covid but we had nothing, there was no support at all.”

“We also decided we had to dop lots more home visits. For most people it was better for us to go to them and them to come to us.

“I can remember going to see one of my patients who had rung me in the morning to say he was sick and I said to him ‘I think you need to go to hospital now’, he said ‘I’m not going to hospital’. I went to see him on my way home and went into the room where he’d been all day, dying. I did get him into hospital that night but he was dead by the morning.”