NHS worker Caroline honoured for training nurses in delivering oxygen to Covid patients

Caroline Lee was made an MBE for her services to health care.

She said the pandemic effort was a collective one by all her colleagues.

“I am humbled actually. With anything in health it is never one person, for this it is not one person, it is the whole team.

“I often say to them, I may be the head of the organisation but the head is no good without the body, arms and legs to do the delivery.

“That body, hands, arms, legs and feet did incredibly well.

“We worked as one to be as responsive and agile as we possibly could.

“They were right behind me in everything that I said we would do.”

She is based at Knockbracken health care park in south Belfast and is head of the clinical education centre for nurses, midwives and allied health professionals.

As the virus swept across Northern Ireland in March all learning had to go online and there was a massive realignment of staffing towards caring for those with the disease.

Many nurses were redeployed from places like outpatient departments into wards.

Ms Lee said: “It was a crazy time, people were working 12 and more hours a day, bank holidays, weekends.”

The training covered areas like infection control and looking after deteriorating patients.

She developed mental health programmes for staff who were traumatised by some of the scenes they witnessed.