On the Covid frontline: photo diary of an ICU consultant

ICU consultant Dr Charlotte Summers has led the critical care surge response at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. She is also a leading research scientist in lung disease at the University of Cambridge, advising England’s chief medical officer Chris Whitty on which treatments to test in clinical trials. FT photographer Charlie Bibby followed her at work to record scenes on the frontline of Covid-19 treatment and research.

As the depths of a snow-speckled winter finally give way to the promise of spring, outside Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge a young couple wander past, laughing in the fresh breeze. Inside the hospital, a quite different scene is playing out. Behind the curtains of the greatly expanded intensive care unit (ICU), patients at the margins of life are battling Covid-19.

Covid-19 has taken a dreadful toll on hospital staff: across the country, hundreds of health and social care workers have lost their lives. At Addenbrooke’s, everyone knows a colleague who has been affected in some way.

On our way between wards we bump into hepatologist, Dr Grace Dolman. She is on her first day back after a 10-month absence with “long Covid”, a condition lasting weeks or months.

Staff at Addenbrooke’s regularly help out on their days off. In ICU, consultant Dr Ruth Clay, an acute paediatrician, is stepping in as a healthcare support worker on a Saturday evening.

Despite the wave of Covid-19 patients, the hospital has continued to treat the ordinary caseload that still exists. There are designated “green zones” of the hospital where patients with emergency healthcare needs can still be seen. “Things have been very stretched,” says Summers. “But we are here, and always have been, for anyone who needs us, whether or not they have Covid.”

In a ward on the ninth floor, Terry Cooper, who specialises in deep cleaning, sterilises contaminated rooms with beams of UV light.

Back on ICU, Summers checks in with Brian Clark, who has just returned from abdominal aortic surgery — one of the many cases that the hospital will have to treat as the surge dissipates.

In a meeting room piled high with office furniture and whiteboards, a blow-up mattress rests against a wall, ready for use by staff on long shifts. After a morning handover, I find Summers coaching her team. It was in this same room on February 12 last year that she and her colleagues started planning for the arrival of a virus they had feared since January. “There were just 10 reported cases in the UK at this point,” she recalls. “It’s a bit like watching a train coming towards you.”

Then on March 15, shortly after the UK government launched its ‘ventilator challenge’, she learned with a growing sense of foreboding that the supply of mechanical ventilators was likely to run out at the end of the month.

Summers studied medicine against the advice of a careers adviser who told her it wasn’t a profession for girls. Yet, it was in the lab that she found her calling. “Science is limitless,” she says. Researching acute respiratory disease syndrome has been her vocation for the past 16 years.

It is not only in the ICU that Summers is fighting the virus. Two floors and 100 paces away is the research group where she and her team are trying to understand their new viral foe. They are developing therapies that, they hope, alongside vaccines, can start to turn the tide of the pandemic around. Summers is part of the national panel that reports to Chris Whitty, chief medical officer for England, nominating therapy candidates to be tested in clinical trials.