So the intensive care will look
after the sickest children in the region
not just in the hospital
not just in the local area but in the entire region.
You can easily get affected
by how unwell the children around you are.
How fragile they are sometimes and you know there are occasions
when it's life/death decisions being made, their life is in the balance.
But you have to develop a bit of
detachment sometimes to be able to cope with it
or otherwise it would be an
incredibly difficult job to do and it's
not a difficult job, it's a wonderful job to do.
I'm on the retrieval team today,
got two teams every day.
We basically retrieve children from district general hospitals
all around the area from south of England,
Kent, Surrey and Sussex basically,
because not every hospital has
a peadiatric intensive care.
So this is our baby pack.
You've got to make sure that it's all functioning well
becasue the last thing you want is for this
not to be working when you're next to a patient.
I'll go and deliver this to Ben.
When are you going? At 11.
Well this one's free for you to use whenever you need it.
So Zachary is three months old
and he was born with a complex congenital heart condition
and he has just had surgery
a few days ago.
Sometimes when these children have heart surgery they come back
on a ventilator because they aren't
quite ready to breathe for themselves or
their lungs may not be strong enough.
You imagine waking up with this tube in your mouth,
not knowing where you are or
what's happening.
It's just really frightening and that is really like the
story of nightmares so it's really
really important to give them play to
make them feel secure, comforted and to help them recover.
Over time what we do is try
and reduce the support that that
ventilator gives to a point where we can
take them off that machine and that's
a process called extubation where we take
that breathing tube out of their mouth.
When all this is going on parents almost
feel like they've been hit by a bus,
and they can't explain how they feel.
And I introduce the diary so the parents can
write down what happens on a daily basis.
It's good to have this so that we know when he gets older
he'll be able to to look back on it
and know how we were feeling at the time
that he was going through it.
So this was two days after the operation
and also people have been sending through text messages.
When they first come here
they're just staring at the machines all the time.
You know and they won't go for breaks
and we say oh come on, you know,
everything's going to be fine let's try and do something.
We spend most of our time being human
you know having human relationships with people,
helping looking after the most precious child
of a family,
and I think that's a huge privilege.
Originally they thought there was an infection.
Once she gets over this chest infection
the plan is then to fix that pipe
and hopefully everything should get better after that.
Well make sure you get some rest as well
because she's resting, she's sleeping
but it's very important that you get some rest too.
So Sophie joined us in December
shortly after she was born.
She was born with hyperplastic left heart syndrome
so one side of her heart hadn't formed properly.
She doesn't need any help with
her breathing anymore, we're just giving
her some support with some medication
to still support the heart.
They say she is better so we are better as well.
It's called intensive care
so you are supposed to work intensively.
You can change 100% mortality
to you know four percent
or less mortality.
Children are getting better and going to the wards.
So this is Zachary's twin sister.
What we often have is families will send us pictures
of the children when they've gone home
and actually there'll be Zachary and his sister
in a month's time you know lying together
and playing together and you know
that's what we all aim for.
It's amazing, I mean it sounds like he's going to do well.
I love the fact that we can help
whole families not just children.
I love the fact the children are so resilient that
they most of them will get better.
No matter how small the difference
we make in their lives it's important.
It's such a satisfying speciality to work in,
it's such a satisfying field to work in.
And it's so exciting, and so interesting that
I couldn't work in any other job.