Clinical Fellow, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, London, UK

Consultant Colorectal Surgeon and Clinical Director, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, London, UK

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected millions of patients around the world. Hospital departments had to adapt their services and expand their bed capacity. Our aim was to lead a team that will create a contingency rota in order to anticipate possible COVID-19 related sickness and support front-line specialities, such as Acute Medicine and Intensive Care.

The team involved in the creation of this rota was led by one junior doctor from every grade. Data from the surgical take showed that the average number of daily surgical inpatients dropped from 47 in February, to 22 by the first week of April. This reduction, together with cancellation of elective operations, allowed us to create a contingency plan with a ward cover, an on-call and a stand-by team at all times. We managed to release doctors to support other departments, ensuring that surgical inpatients were receiving the pre-COVID-19 standards of care. We, also, created a ‘buddy system’, predicting possible COVID-19 sickness in the on-call or the ward-cover team. On this contingency rota, there was a ward cover team with one SHO, three FY1s and two registrars, including the team for ITU support and a ‘standby’ ward-cover team. Two of the FY1 doctors were redeployed to reinforce Acute Medicine. There was constant feedback via a ‘WhatsApp’ group from the on-call and the ward-cover team to recruit help from the standby team

All doctors who were part of this rota were invited to provide feedback via a satisfaction survey. Out of 13 responses, 61.54% replied that they were satisfied or very satisfied with the contingency rota, and 76.92% replied that the rota was fair to very fair. The rota was designed by Junior doctors proving that well-thought planning measures can make all the difference when facing extremely difficult and unprecedented situations like the COVID-19 pandemic.