Prince William has said that NHS staff need “enforced career breaks” to prevent burnout after he visited a hospital to mark five years since the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Prince of Wales told staff and volunteers while visiting the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading: “Everyone in the NHS is there to care for others, so the last person who gets looked after is the individual.
“And I’ve seen when I’ve worked with doctors and nurses, when I’ve worked with paramedics, they always put it down the line because they don’t want to put their workload on someone else.
William worked as an air ambulance helicopter pilot in East Anglia in 2015 for two years after his service in the RAF Search and Rescue Force. He has since served as a patron of NHS Charities Together alongside his wife, Kate Middleton.
He continued: “For me, looking into the nation’s mental health over the last few years, unless there’s almost enforced breaks in someone’s career, as part of your career development, we’re never going to get to that point where you can look after their mental health, because you always rely on the individual to put their hand up.”
While in Reading, he visited the Oasis staff health and wellbeing centre and garden, set up with funding from the charity after the pandemic.
Lead nurse Sergio Tammelleo told William that his team had received support from its psychological service after they cared from some of Britain’s first Covid-19 patients.
He said: “It’s really difficult to think about that. It’s been five years already, lots of things that happened. I remember doing some swabs to patients back in the end of February 2020, not knowing a lot about that.”
Mr Tammelleo had been unable to see his family in Italy for more than two years because he was worried about passing the virus over to elderly relatives.
He said: “We still have some COVID cases around the hospital, so we still talk about it and sometimes you just stop and think about what has happened in the past.
“You know, thinking about what we did, what we have been through, and difficult times, especially for people that live alone and they were not able to see their family.”
Prince William has long advocated for mental health through his work in the Royal Foundation, but has also spoken about the impact working with the air ambulance service had on his mental health.
Speaking in 2021, he said: “Something that I noticed from my brief spell flying the air ambulance with the team is, when you see so much death and so much bereavement, it does impact how you see the world.”
“It impacts your own life and your own family life because it is always there.”
