Dr's Sarah and Nigel Taylor

Sarah - Clinical Psychologist at St Lukes, Bradford in the Acute Trust:
"At the moment I am unable to do face to face consultations with patients but we are able to do the consulation over the phones. We’re also aiming to do much more working with staff, supporting staff who themselves are working with corvid on ICU within the hospital. We’re working on a help line for staff which means we now also work at weekends, and we're just trying to be helpful to other staff in the hospital."

Nigel - GP at Hebden Bridge Group Practice, also Clinical Director of the newly formed Upper Calderdale Primary Care Network:
"I work as a GP which, at the moment, is quite different to what we normally do. The GP practices throughout Calderdale are all open and functioning as normally as they can but as a ‘telephone first’ service, so if you need medical help you can ring up and we’ll speak to you on the phone. All GP’s in Calderdale have organised themselves into five ‘face to face’ hub sites and in the upper valley, the hub site is at Todmorden, so we’re seeing patients who need to be seen face to face only at Todmorden which is divided to minimise risk of cross contamination. In one half of the building we’re seeing patients who don’t have respiratory problems and separately we are seeing patients who do have respiratory problem and may have symptoms of corvid infection.

We’re all working in teams and rotating doing one week seeing patients, one week consulting from home. We have reasonable supplies of PPE and we’ve been quite lucky in maintaining those and we’ve been working together across Calderdale to try and ensure that all GP services have got adequate supplies. We’ve been trying make ourselves as safe as possible and that has been working reasonably well. It’s a new way of working and everything is very different – we do want to make sure people know we are still working and are still available. We are concerned that patients do contact us when they need medical help because we are here for them - just in a different way."

13.5.20