Black South African Nurse Battling COVID-19 virus


Black South African Nurse Battling COVID-19 virus



Today a Black South African nurse lies in ITU bed, on a ventilator, with no family around her.
Nurses and doctors attending to her care are doing their best to keep her alive and inform her family of any development updates.
It’s less than a week since she has been lying on that ITU bed and the truth is, the doctors are immensely under an unimaginable pressure to turn off her ventilator so that they can get someone else to take her bed. She hasn’t even been given a chance for her body to fight off the virus yet they want to take her life away from her loved ones. There is not even an opportunity for her family to negotiate whether to turn the ventilator off or not.
Research suggests that critically ill patients can be on a ventilator for variable times ranging just from days to weeks. We also acknowledge that professionals, not machine must make a decision to take patient off a ventilator. Patients must show signs of improvement in lung function needing just minimal support from the ventilator to breath and eventually off the ventilator.
If that was you, faced with this situation, what would you do?
This is the reality, Black people are not given a chance while others are given weeks to see if they recover. This is an NHS nurse. She has been saving so many lives under the mighty name of NHS but who is there to save her? NHS guidelines for management of critical care for COVID-19 around Clinical decision making states that “Patients should not be treated differently because of anticipated future pressures: it is important to focus on current clinical demands and available resources.”

Only if she could be given another chance… Only if… Who will listen? Who will be there for her?

Could we be treated equally? Where is Equal opportunity? Does is not apply during Covid-19 outbreak? She probably nursed one of your loved ones but did you know that she did? No, because no one saw her. To some she was just an invisible nurse behind the scene and someone will be get the credit.
Written April 17, 2020

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