There’s a strange mood in the intensive care unit (ICU) where I work at the moment. It’s one of controlled planning, paperwork and people pulling together in ways that on a normal day perhaps wouldn’t happen.

ICUs are as prepared as they can be. Locally business as usual has made way for preparations for caring for high numbers of patients. We are finding every ventilator we may have and identifying every suitably qualified member of staff. We will work together to fill gaps as best we can.

There’s a sense of anticipation about what the next eight, 10, 12 weeks are going to bring in terms of work. Anyone who works in healthcare is also a mum, dad, daughter, brother, son. We want to give everything to saving lives and work and care, but equally we’re thinking about the logistics of personal lives and elderly relatives too.

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It must be so hard for those people who are elderly, frail, vulnerable or with underlying health conditions listening to endless news reports saying they are at a greater risk. Members of my family fall into these categories. I want to remind everyone that we are here and have not forgotten about them.

Every day I meet people for whom treatment in intensive care isn’t in their best interests, those conversations will happen equally but the difference in number will be markedly greater. We see lots of conditions where there aren’t any treatments or cures. In these cases, complex machines or drugs would not help.

What the NHS has to do more than ever at the moment is prioritise care more than treatment, not just for frail, elderly and vulnerable people but for staff too. This will be a long, tough time for them and we know from other countries that contracting Covid-19 in a healthcare setting is a big problem.

My worst nightmare is having insufficient workforce and equipment to meet patient needs. Whether or not that will come to fruition is tough to predict. To some extent, intensive care is a specialty used to these decisions. We often only have seconds and minutes to do things. We have to think on our feet and work 24/7 anyway.

We have a psychologist in our ICU who’s doing a huge amount of thinking about putting in place wellbeing resources for staff who might be in moral distress after having to prioritise one patient over another, for example. If there are 500 patients and only 200 ventilators then that’s when we need national guidance from the government and other bodies. It can’t be up to individual doctors. The age of playing God is long behind us. The question is who should we be making decisions with: the public, government or within the profession?

We’re trained in medicine to have an outer facade of calm. We try to arrive at stressful and uncoordinated situations with a sense of structure because that saves lives. How long can we continue to do that if this crisis turns out to be medium or worst case scenario?

That’s going to be tough on frontline staff. We have gone through a sea change in intensive care the last five years with regards to burnout or moral distress. It’s now talked about pretty openly because that is our work on a day to day basis. But, support is not as well established in those areas that you think aren’t typically affected by life or death decisions.

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It’s easy to forget about the lab staff doing thousands of tests in really tough conditions with no break. They are bombarded with tests and phone calls asking when the results will be in. They often don’t have access to support services because they are a step removed.

The cooks, porters, and people pushing beds of patients who have died need as much support as those of us on the frontline. There can never be enough support and recognition for those support staff.

We’ll only know the impact when the worst has passed. During the crisis cracks will show but when the calm has returned, people will reflect and process what has happened. The times when I feel upset or anxious or angry are never when I’m caring for a patient or during a procedure. We’ll see the effects of this crisis, not in days or weeks or even months – it will be longer than that. Those ripples will extend out beyond the walls of the ICU, into the hospital and beyond healthcare.

• Matt Morgan is an intensive care doctor