Nurse Jenny, the Kiwi nurse who helped care for UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson after he was hospitalised with Covid-19 last year in May, has voiced her concerns over the possibility of a third wave in London.
Jenny McGee told Seven Sharp she worked in Curaçao, in the Caribbean, for several months on a nursing contract following her public resignation from the NHS in May 2021.
The London-based Invercargill nurse said looking back, she had been “really burnt out post the second wave in London”.
“I couldn't get into New Zealand and it was getting me down so I knew I needed to come up with a Plan B; I needed an adventure, I needed to come up with something different.
“Work was just the same stuff every day but 100 miles an hour, I recognised I couldn't really keep going on like that and I needed a break in some form and they say a change is as good as a holiday so I found this opportunity to go to the Caribbean and jumped at the chance."
She called the second wave “horrendous”, adding, “I was going to work and doing my job but I was on autopilot”.
Jenny McGee says NHS staff aren’t getting the respect and pay they deserve and she’s sick of it. (Source: Other)
“I've done intensive care for 10 years and spent my whole career being good at intensive care, but I don't have any ambition in it at the moment, I've fallen out of love with it at the moment and I'm trying desperately to get it back.
McGee said while going to the Caribbean has helped, "I don't know if I can go back to it permanently".
McGee received global attention for caring for Boris Johnson when he contracted the coronavirus. (Source: Other)
"It's just I've lost the passion for it. I've always been quite ambitious and I don't know where to go from here in intensive care. I know I can go and do it, I've booked in some shifts next week when I'm out of quarantine — just some day-by-day shifts to pick up work and that will be interesting — but I just don't know where to go on it.
"I feel like I've done so much I don't know what to do in it now."
She believes people will become more complacent as we hear of "all the strains that are coming about" in the next few years, adding that nurses are "really scared about a third wave here in London".
"No one is ready for it; I think hospitals are trying to get themselves ready for a third wave but I don't think anyone can really believe that we could get ourselves through another wave.
"I think we did so well on the second wave and I think the worry is there's no way that we can keep that up. We can't do a third wave, but at the same time, you know, life does have to go back to normal at some point. It's just quite scary when you are going to be on the receiving end of the fallout if this goes very, very wrong but the vaccination programme seems to be working a treat.
"At the moment, it seems like a lot of young people in hospital haven't been vaccinated with Covid. We're not seeing the numbers like we did in January, February so there is some pretty solid evidence about vaccination at the moment."
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