5 years since COVID hit: 'We've been left behind'

Lockdowns, uncertainty, and hand sanitiser. Grocery shortages. Downing Street briefings. Difficult shifts at work. The new normal.

At times, the arrival of COVID-19 feels like it was a lifetime ago; at others, like it was just yesterday.

It was 5 years ago, on 11 March 2020, that the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic.

We’ve spoken to nursing staff about that time: what stays with them and why they feel we must continue to tell this story.

'Long COVID ended my career': Lisa's story

Before the pandemic, Lisa was a senior staff nurse at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), working in the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU).

But she spent some of the pandemic working at her local hospital in London, as the PICU at GOSH was relatively quiet. The local hospital's adult ICU, however, was overwhelmed with patients.

“I knew I was putting myself at greater risk for getting COVID, and putting my husband and daughter at risk, but I felt that it was important to give something back to the community that I lived in.”

Lisa did 2 stints at her local hospital during the pandemic.

In adult ICU, she was shocked at seeing "rows and rows” of patients that were ventilated.

“Safer staffing levels went out the window. It should be 1 to 1 for a ventilated patient, and at times 2 to 1. But we were lucky if we managed to have 2 or 3 patients per nurse within the intensive care unit. Sometimes 4 if we were covering breaks.”

We interviewed Lisa at her home, where her family’s love of arts and crafts is evident everywhere you look. This hobby occupied a lot of the time spent at home during the pandemic, where Lisa lives with her husband and daughter, who was around 9 when COVID initially hit.

Remarkably, for someone working on the front line, Lisa avoided getting COVID herself for more than 2 years, but when she did – in October 2022 – it was catastrophic.

Even now, it saddens me that I can't do the job I love

Having returned to work, she had a particularly busy shift and then fatigue hit her, hard.

“My legs were throbbing. I couldn’t describe it. Until a few months later when I went to the long COVID clinic and they said, ‘Do you feel like you’ve run a marathon?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s it! That’s the exact feeling of fatigue I've had.’”

Over 2 years she tried everything to get back to her job, including phased returns and having occupational health assessments, but was knocked back by catching COVID-19 again during this period.

• Read next: Long COVID – nursing staff still denied access to financial support.

Eventually, she had to accept she couldn’t keep up with the physical demands of the job. Ill-health retirement was her only option. This was confirmed in October 2024.

For Lisa, long COVID is with her all the time. She has fatigue, pain in her legs, brain fog and memory loss. Her sight has been affected. Her heart rate is erratic, and she suffers from dysautonomia, conditions that affect the nervous system.

“It’s taken over my everyday life.”

She’s devastated that long COVID has cut short her career.

“I started at GOSH in January 2000. I was 2 months short of 25 years there. My career’s gone. Even now, it saddens me that I can't do the job I love.”

Lisa tries to stay positive. She says the RCN has been amazing, recently being instrumental in helping her secure Industrial Injuries Disablement Benefit (IIDB). This benefit is for people who have been injured at work, but for people like Lisa it can be a fight to get it, as long COVID isn’t recognised as a condition under IIDB.

Lisa is active in the RCN long COVID peer support group, which she urges anyone else in her situation to join.

• Read next: RCN resources to support people with long COVID.

She hopes people remember the valuable contribution nursing staff made during COVID.

“I remember being out there clapping and thinking, ‘Yes, the government really understands us. They’re going to be really supportive. And now the pandemic is over, I just feel like we've been left behind.”

'I’m still in nursing – because of COVID': Georgia's story

Georgia is a nursing associate and student nurse. She works in a nursing home in Nottingham – the same place she worked when the pandemic hit.

At the time, she was 17 and just a few months into her first paid job.

It was hard to communicate with patients effectively from behind masks. And she was frustrated they couldn’t provide end-of-life care to their usual high standards, with people isolated and unable to see their relatives.

“After the first wave, we learned that we needed to be positive for the people that were still here. As upset as we were that we'd lost people, we still had a house full of people that needed our love and care."

When she caught COVID herself, she was scared: “I remember my mum making phone calls to my manager, crying, because she didn't know what was going to happen to me. It was so early on, and we didn't know if people survived COVID at that point.”

Georgia says her team has done a lot of work to try to process the trauma of working through COVID: “We sit together and talk about the people that we lost, to keep their memory alive... to process the fact that we don’t think we would have lost them otherwise.”

She and her colleagues have “never been closer” because of what they went through together.

• Read next: Dealing with the psychological impact of COVID-19.

And it’s completely changed her career path: “Had COVID not have happened, I would have left the nursing home to go on to study law. This was a Saturday job for me, it was never going to be long term.

“Looking back, there is some anger and frustration about the level of support we received, but 5 years on, we're at a place where we spin it into a positive outlook, and we try to remember what COVID brought us, rather than what it took from us.”

‘We went into work with a smile... but lessons must be learned’: Alison's story

Alison is a district nursing sister team manager and specialist nurse practitioner in Cwmbran, south Wales.

She spent the pandemic working in the community, visiting patients in their homes and sometimes in nursing homes.

She remembers the sheer volume of work: “The amount of calls was getting higher and higher, and the number of patients that we would see daily was growing.

“That was hard work. We didn't want to take COVID home to our families, but we had to go into work to do our jobs, and we did it with a smile.”

A woman was dying, her daughter was standing outside, shouting through the window, 'I’m here, mum'

Her patients are primarily people who are housebound, and Alison says it was hard for many people with learning disabilities or dementia to see nursing staff come into their homes in the necessary PPE such as masks, face shields and gowns.

Her team also had responsibility for giving COVID-19 vaccinations, and she remembers people naturally having lots of questions about the emerging jabs.

Alison says one memory of the time really stays with her: “We were working in a nursing home because they didn't have enough nursing staff to support the number of patients that suddenly went down with COVID. And we lost 16 people in that home that week.

“A woman was dying, and her daughter was standing outside shouting to her through the window, saying, ‘I'm here, mum, I'm here’, but not being able to come into the building. Shouting out, so that her mum would know that she was still there. I'll never forget that.”

Alison caught COVID-19 herself early in the pandemic, in March 2020. She had breathing difficulties and was taken into A&E, where she says the care was “absolutely fantastic”.

Her dad died in May 2020 (though not from COVID-19). And one of her daughters had a baby during the pandemic, which she says was “a horrendous experience” because she needed extra support, which was difficult because of social restrictions.

Alison worries about the lasting effects of the pandemic on public health: the people who missed appointments for non-COVID related issues or whose overall health got worse during those lost years.

But mostly she wants to ensure that lessons have been learned.

“We got through it on good will. Now we no longer have enough nursing staff out there to be able to do that. So many people are retiring, and their roles are not being filled.”

She says to politicians and governments: "Make sure that you put value on nursing staff and give the general public the NHS that we need. Because if you haven't got any nursing staff, who's going to give health care in the UK?”