2 April 2025

NHS staff are still traumatised by the pandemic

Despite their continuing levels of severe distress, funding has now been withdrawn from mental health hubs.

Five years ago, the world was upended. Quarantine – an entire population shut down by decree – was something that only happened elsewhere: in films, books, other countries, other eras. But on 23 March 2020, it arrived for us, with a modern name but a medieval reek of plague: lockdown.

From day one, death dominated the national consciousness. Everyone seemed to know someone who had lost a loved one to Covid. Daily televised death tolls became as routine as the weather forecast. The bodies did indeed pile high. Between March 2020 and May 2023, when the World Health Organisation declared an end to the state of global health emergency, nearly 227,000 people had died in the UK with Covid-19 certified as a cause of death.

Five years later, all that death and disruption feels like a fever dream – too weird, too outlandish to recall with clarity. As with all traumatic experiences, it can be tempting to look doggedly forwards, living as though none of it really happened. But for huge numbers of NHS staff, this isn’t a viable option. This week, I asked a few hospital colleagues who worked on Covid wards what their abiding emotions were now. “I can’t really allow myself to think about certain things. I can’t allow myself to recall emotions or experiences because they feel too big. They feel too hard,” said one colleague, a consultant in palliative medicine.

“The worst thing was patients dying without the people they loved at their bedside. It was just so wrong, it upsets me to think of it,” said an ITU nurse.

“I remember coming in to work… and four patients had died overnight, and others were already close to dying. It felt like a conveyor belt,” said a junior doctor.

These messages, sent as voicenotes to my phone, had one thing in common: each respondent broke down in tears. On listening, I felt like crying too. The sheer scale of death was bad enough, but its dehumanised nature was worse. Healthcare is visceral. Tactility, tenderness and warmth are its core. Infection-control measures, though necessary, violated our instincts to care. Wards were stripped of visitors, staff barricaded behind swathes of PPE. One patient told me her time in the hospital felt like “being dropped into Hades”. It felt like that to us, too.

What does the enduring rawness of many healthcare workers’ pandemic recollections mean for the NHS? Specifically, what does it mean for Wes Streeting’s pledge to get the health service “back on its feet” and “fit for the future”? Rock-bottom morale among NHS staff is well documented. In a recent YouGov poll of NHS workers, around three-quarters of respondents said they experienced burnout or exhaustion at least some of the time, including 27 per cent who felt this way “always” or “most of the time”. Crucially, one in eight staff said they planned to leave the NHS within the next 12 months; 110,00 posts in England are currently unfilled.

What has markedly changed in the past five years is the range of support services provided for struggling staff. Initially, the NHS response to unprecedented Covid pressures was radical. A network of mental health hubs, designed to offer psychological support to all NHS staff, was hastily set up, with an annual budget of £38.5m. In 2023 the funding was cut, and last year it was completely withdrawn, despite continuing severe levels of psychological distress among staff. At one hub, 30 per cent of users presented with suicidal thoughts.

Meanwhile, pandemic pressures have morphed into those of the NHS clinical permacrisis – too few staff trying to care for too many patients, the spectacle of patients dying on trolleys in corridors occurring year round. Unless tailored, meaningful mental health support is embedded in Streeting’s ten-year plan for the NHS, the health service will continue to haemorrhage its greatest asset: dedicated, caring staff.

Phil Whitaker will return to Health Matters this summer. Rachel Clarke’s “The Story of a Heart” has been shortlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction

[See also: The Europeans who built Britain]