NHS Grampian chief executive: ‘I was scared, many of our colleagues will describe having sleepless nights’

The chief executive of NHS Grampian has spoken of the difficulties of preparing for the pandemic because they “didn’t know what was coming.”

Professor Caroline Hiscox worked as part of a team leading the tactical response in Grampian while employed as executive nurse director last year.

“Were we prepared enough? Absolutely not,” she said.

“Could we have been? I don’t think so.”

Due to the nature of the first wave of Covid, staff were learning from the experiences of colleagues from across the world.

The health board is required to have plans in place for major incidents, such as infectious disease outbreaks and pandemics, but they were unable to fully brace themselves for what was to come.

Prof Hiscox said: “I don’t think we knew what was coming, and beyond the Spanish Flu, the preparedness of our system was the best it could be.

“Were we underprepared? Not from a planning perspective, but from a reality perspective.

“Could we have done things differently, of course we could.”

Prof Hiscox recalls how “distressing” news of the crisis came from colleagues working in hospitals around the world and how staff in the NHS learned from their experiences.

‘Colleagues had sleepless nights at the beginning of the pandemic’

She said she vividly remembers watching global news coverage and realising the virus was going to come to the UK.

“Then when that became a reality, the coverage, not just in the media but coming through professional routes of the experiences of colleagues across the world, I was distressed, I was scared, many of our colleagues will describe having sleepless nights at the beginning of the pandemic,” she said.

Staff at NHS Grampian reached out to friends working in other parts of the world for advice as the coronavirus crisis unfolded.

Prof Hiscox said: “We were very thoughtful of their experiences and took every opportunity to learn from what they were doing in our preparedness for wave one and thankfully, not to diminish that every single illness and loss that we had in Grampian will have been particularly distressing and awful for that family, we did not experience the extent of the impact on our healthcare system in Grampian as others did globally.

“And for that, I will be eternally grateful because I don’t know how you recover from that.”

‘The experience of the past 16 months has changed health and care’

Porf Hiscox, who took on the role of the chief executive in November, said the experiences of the past 16 months had changed how NHS Grampian will approach health and care services in the future.

She said it remained a “very challenging” time to lead any organisation, particularly when their greatest asset, their staff, were under personal and professional pressure.

She previously told how the backlog on surgery waiting lists caused by Covid-19 would take years to clear.

Prof Hiscox praised the work of the team working alongside her at NHS Grampian.

She said: “I don’t believe my job has been any more difficult than anyone else’s and I am working with a great team who I knew very well and already had the relationships and the understanding of from a person centre perspective of what it was we were trying to achieve as an organisation, as a culture.

“We’ve tried to hold on to that dearly to do the best we can for our workforce and for the citizens of Grampian.”

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