Charlotte (Charlie) Hubbet, Junior Doctor at High Dependency Unit and Emergency Medicine of Newham University Hospital, filmed in artist's studio in October 2020.
In 2020, during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Charlotte Hubbet was working at Newham Hospital, and it was her first year as a doctor. She began in the COVID High Dependency Unit (HDU) before being redeployed to the Emergency Department.
In her interview, Dr. Hubbet recalls the early days of the pandemic as a time of uncertainty and rapid change. COVID procedures and protocols were not yet established, and the virus spread quickly within the hospital. Patients were often kept in open bays, where they were at risk of infecting others or becoming infected themselves. Neither patients nor staff had adequate protection, and some people lost their lives as a result.
Dr. Hubbet shares her struggles to adapt to a new way of working and caring for sick patients. The normal hospital routines were replaced by Covid practices, with ward-based ceilings of care.
She also expresses her opinion about the Newham community, stating that the government does not care about the people living there. There was not enough housing and healthcare initiatives were lacking. Communication was also poor, as around 280 languages are spoken in Newham, yet most of the information distributed through A&E was provided mostly in English.
Keywords: High Dependency Unit (HDU), Death from Covid, Moral injury, Difficult conversations, CPAP, BiPAP, Intubation