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A coroner has concluded that an ambulance worker in Wales who caught Covid while attending to an infected patient died from an ‘industrial disease’.
Coroner Paul Bennett said 59-year-old Alan Haigh’s employment as an emergency medical technician during the pandemic presented the ‘greatest risk’ to his health.
Alan, who died in Glangwili General Hospital in Carmarthen, Wales on 9 February 2021, was the third ambulance worker to die from coronavirus in Wales, according to the BBC.
The acting senior coroner for Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire concluded at Alan’s inquest at Llanelli Town Hall that there was ‘sufficient evidence’ to conclude that the NHS worker had been exposed to ‘two incidents’ of Covid-19.
The BBC reported that the emergency medical technician was part of a team transporting an infected patient to the red Covid ward at Prince Philip Hospital in Llanelli on 28 November 2020.
South Wales Guardian reported that Alan and his colleague Cadi Jenkins had arrived at the home of a patient who displayed breathing problems and they confirmed that the person did have Covid-19.
Giving evidence to the inquest, Catrin Convery, a manager for the Welsh Ambulance Service, said that for routine patients, staff would be issued with level 2 PPE, comprising masks, gloves and aprons. However, when a patient was suspected of having the virus, staff were given Versaflow hoods.
When the coroner asked whether she was aware that Alan had reported that he thought he had contracted the virus ‘as a consequence of one of the calls he had made’, she confirmed a conversation logged on 28 November in which Alan said he ‘thought he had caught it from a patient’.
Cadi told the inquest that her colleague was wearing an amber level 2 face mask when they attended the patient, so that Alan could ‘get an “eyes on” on the patient before deciding they needed a nebuliser’.
She told the inquest that she had donned red level 3 PPE so she could administer the treatment.
When asked why Alan had not put on the same level PPE immediately, Cadi said: ‘I believe at this time, from what I can remember, for Covid-19 patients the level was amber PPE and we were to switch to red level PPE for nebulisation or if we felt it was more high risk if they were coughing a lot.’
The inquest subsequently heard how Alan began to show Covid symptoms on 30 November and tested positive a few days later.
His wife, Sian, told the inquest that her husband started complaining of tiredness. He had developed a cough and needed to go to bed to rest.
‘He couldn’t keep his eyes open, and he went back to bed and basically slept for 24 hours,’ she recalled.
However, his conditioned worsened and Alan was admitted to Glangwili General Hospital on 7 December. He was moved to the hospital’s intensive care unit two days later and two days after Boxing Day he was put on a ventilator.
His wife said she would speak to him every day on the phone until he was sedated and placed on the ventilator.
She added that her husband had always been extra careful when transporting and attending to patients during the pandemic because she was an asthma sufferer and they had vulnerable relatives.
‘We started being very careful with everything,’ she told the inquest. ‘We always wore masks, and we took it very seriously.’
She said that her husband had started to shower at work before coming home and would bring his washing back and do it himself. ‘He wouldn’t let me touch it,’ she told the inquest.
Alan, who was from Cwmduad in Carmarthenshire, had joined the ambulance service in 1998. The BBC reported that his colleagues described him as a ‘full-of-life character who loved to chat’.
One of his two sons, Colin, read a tribute on behalf of the family to thank Alan’s NHS colleagues who had cared for him when he fell ill.
‘The sights of hundreds of NHS staff, ambulance personnel and friends that lined the streets in a show of support and kinship for his funeral will live long in our memories,’ he said. ‘We were completely overwhelmed and immensely touched.’
Alan is survived by his wife, Sian, sons Colin and Ryan and a granddaughter, who was born four months before his death.
