Yesterday I went to two different London A&Es with my 86 year old dad. The staff at the first ( Central Middx ) had no PPE, the staff at the second (Northwick Park ) only had face masks and gloves. The incoming patients had better face masks than the NHS staff. #COVID19

None of the staff had been tested, but they had several colleagues who were at home self-isolating. A senior doctor told me that in Northwick Park, ICU was running at minus 50 staff because staff were either sick or self isolating.

Based on their perception of their level of exposure to CV they believed that most of them in A&E / ICU have had CV, possibly many asymptomatic and so possibly carriers / spreaders. They thought the govt had chosen to follow herd immunity science so had started testing too late.

The shift in A & E was 9 nurses down. They couldn’t recruit enough through the bank ( even though the bank has put up their rate by £10 p/h - which doesn’t apply to healthcare assistants). They had a young medical student on her first A & E shift ever.

The latter reset my dad’s fractured bones. Until today when she did so on my dad, she had never inserted a canula. On discussing the new Nightingale hospital, they had only one question - who will staff it?

We heard ambulances non-stop. The doctors told me that there was a high rate of sickness in ambulance staff; ill because they transport the sickest without PPE and testing, and with fast turnaround not allowing for deep cleaning. Soon we won’t be able to transport sick people.

In A & E triage, despite additional safety measures in place to sift out CV patients, there were ill, mainly young men - grey, shivering, draped over seats, unable to walk - looking at 13 hour waits for a sniff of a bed.

A terrified woman dumped her husband at the door because he had CV symptoms and she herself had lupus: an auto immune problem. Her husband was so sick he could not walk. Minutes later she came back with his bag and dumped that in the same place and she turned around and ran away.

In preparation for working in Afghanistan, I did hostile environment training. One exercise was a sudden air and ground attack leaving bodies all over the place, and we triaged them based on those most likely to survive their injuries. I was thrown back to how that felt.

I cried on the way home, because we are not even at peak yet. I fear many of our brave NHS staff and carers will emerge with PTSD.