Dan Joslin has been a firefighter for 14 years, but for the past six weeks he has been helping to lift and turn COVID-19 patients in a hospital intensive care unit (ICU).
“I never thought I’d be doing this in my career,” said the 33-year-old watch manager, one of eight firefighters volunteering at Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth, a historic port city on England’s south coast.
Altogether, 27 firefighters in distinctive red medical scrubs have been helping out at four hospitals in Portsmouth and across the county of Hampshire, working 12-hour shifts.
Photo: AFP
They are the first full-time firefighters to be sent to ICUs, where the most severely ill COVID-19 patients are treated, said station manager Alex Rhodes, from Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service.
“I think we’re fairly confident it’s the first time, [we are] the only firefighters to do it across the country,” Joslin said.
“It’s a groundbreaking bit of work we’ve been doing,” he said.
Now, they hope other regions across the UK would follow their lead, if cases peak again, to bring some respite to hard-pushed hospital staff.
New, more transmissible variants of COVID-19 led to a surge in hospital admissions over the winter in the UK, stretching hospital bed capacity and staff to the limit.
Some firefighters have been drafted in to help drive ambulances, as all emergency services have pulled together in the unprecedented response.
Across the UK they have also been helping in vaccination centers, as the government rolls out a mass inoculation program under the guidance of the National Health Service (NHS).
Cate Leighton, a senior clinical administrator at Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trust, said that the support of the firefighters was welcome.
“The critical care team and wider Trust are incredibly grateful for the enthusiasm and dedication of the firefighters who have volunteered to work with us and our patients,” Leighton said. “They have brought a real boost to our staff during these difficult times and helped support them with a wide range of tasks.”
Firefighters can be useful quickly because of the work they usually do, Rhodes said.
“The hospitals have all said how fantastic it’s been, having people who are used to working with trauma and intensive care patients,” he said.
Firefighters are also “used to dealing with high levels of psychological stress,” Joslin said.
The 27 firefighters, several of them female, are now ending their deployment for a positive reason — the drop in case numbers means that medics can now cope on their own, Rhodes said.
When first sent out, they focused on helping to “prone” patients — roll them onto their chest to help them breathe more easily.
The delicate task takes between four and six people, as patients are hooked up to so many tubes.
Lately, with fewer very sick patients, they are doing more “general dogsbody” work, Joslin said.
All the firefighters had to be vaccinated and underwent psychological screening due to the difficult nature of the work.
Joslin, whose wife is a nurse in accident and emergency department, trains firefighters in medical care and was better prepared than most, but he said helping in the hospital had been an eye-opener, particularly working with medical staff who have often been treating COVID-19 patients nonstop for the past 12 months.
“We’re in awe at what the nurses and the ICU staff have been doing,” Joslin said.
Helping out with those most sick, “we have seen a lot of the patients that we’ve been working with over the last six weeks pass away,” he said.
However, Joslin shared in the delight of medics when patients improved enough to leave the ICU.
While firefighters usually work frantically in the “initial hour” after an accident, helping those who require urgent medical help, a hospital ICU has a different rhythm, Joslin said.
“Here it’s a lot calmer, a lot more controlled,” he said.
If their services are needed again, the firefighters would be ready to deploy to ICUs within 24 hours, he added.
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