Too much information

Rio de Janeiro Botanical Gardens, April 2019

So we finish another week of 'lockdown'. I'm not finding it difficult or stressful at all, but I seem to be a lucky soul in not getting anxious about things that are out of my control. And even things that are within my control don't bother me that much either. And I'm not exactly locked down, what with having to go out to work two days a week.

At work, I'm getting bombarded with information from all sides that changes almost every day. The Dietetic Department must be one of the most well-organised in the hospital. We have two joint Managers who are excellent, not that I see them more than once a year. From the first sign that arrangements within the hospital would very likely change dramatically over the next weeks and months, the whole department began to change in anticipation.

Face to face consultations stopped first in favour of telephone calls, shortly before all outpatient clinics were stopped. This had two benefits. Firstly there was less for the department to do which was helpful as some staff were already self-isolating,  Secondly, all those whose jobs included outpatient work were suddenly available, and they were put to work in formulating operational procedures in four strands: Critical Care, Non-critical Inpatients, Outpatients, and Community.

Everyone in the department was assigned to one of these teams . Except that I seem to be in two teams: Inpatient and Outpatient.

I had a call at home from one of the Inpatient leads, telling me that I would be required on the wards at the hospital where I work, which is not where all the Covid-19 cases will be. At my hospital we will be taking everybody who doesn't have the virus who has been displaced from the other hospital. I left my post on the wards about seven years ago with grateful thanks, but this is the situation now. It was agreed that I would need an update, so I arranged to go and meet the current ward Dietitian.

In the meantime, I successfully argued that there wasn't much I could do to help, so they might as well allow me to carry on doing my clinics (over the phone) until after Easter. But when I arrived at work on the following Monday, my clinics had been cancelled anyway. This left me with absolutely nothing to do, and then I was told that I was actually going to be in the Outpatient team, maybe as well as the Inpatient team. But there was still nothing for me to do, except for reading all the emails that contained all sorts of policies and procedures and spreadsheets and guidelines and drafts.

At the same time as all this, we were getting frequent updates from the top level Trust management team. The latest was a change in the policy for wearing Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) - a mask would now be required for any type of patient contact, even in outpatients. A few patients are still going to be coming to the Diabetes Centre in person - it isn't possible to start someone on insulin over the phone, for example. In case you were wondering, there's been no sign of uniforms yet. But we are all going to get an Easter Egg, so that's nice.

I spent an hour or two with the ward Dietitian, a young man that I didn't know who was covering for the usual Dietitian's annual leave. He had nothing to do either, so it didn't feel too bad to take up his time reminding me of the calculation for tube feeding, going through the specifications for different nutritional supplements, hospital policy on drug charts, menus, meals and snacks. Nothing significant has changed in the last seven years but a lot of the detail was different, and on the whole, better and more organised.

So I'm supposed to keep an eye on this torrent of emails while I have time off for the visit of a cousin who is now not coming, and after Easter I have no idea what I'll be doing. The Consultant's Diabetes clinic is still going ahead (by telephone) so my preference would be to do my actual job, but who knows if this will be allowed. The Consultant himself has been tested for the virus and found positive, but he has now recovered; there is talk that we might eventually be tested but we are low on the list of priorities so it won't be soon. So far, my immediate colleagues and I all remain well.