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'Pure, liquid hope' what the vaccine means to me as a GP
‘纯粹的、流动的希望。’作为一名全科医生，疫苗对我来说意味着什么
During the week I work in a small, inner-city GP practice in Edinburgh with 14 staff, caring for almost 4,000 patients. Before the pandemic, I used to see 25-30 people in face-to-face appointments every day. A year into the pandemic, the need out there is the same, but my GP colleagues and I manage more like five or six face-to-face (or mask-to-mask) consultations, a home visit or two, and the remainder on the phone or through video calls. It's not the best way to practise medicine, but for the moment, it's the best we have.
那一周，我在爱丁堡市中心的一家小型全科医生诊所工作，那里有14名员工，要照顾近4000名病人。在新冠爆发之前，我每天要面对面约见25-30名病人。在新冠爆发的那一年里，需求是一样的，但我和我的同事们每天只进行五到六次的面对面(或口罩对口罩)咨询、一两次家访，剩下的通过电话或者视频电话进行。这不是最好的行医方式，但目前，这是最好的办法。
The first I heard of the vaccine rollout was back in October, when our practice manager received an email from the health board asking if we would have capacity to vaccinate the over-80s among our patients. We said yes, of course: in the past year we've had four patients die of Covid-19, three of them over 80.
我第一次听说疫苗推广是在10月份，当时我们的业务经理收到了来自卫生委员会的一封电子邮件，询问我们是否有能力为80岁以上的患者接种疫苗。我们的回答是肯定的：在过去的一年里，我们有4名患者死于新冠，其中有3人超过80岁。
It would be the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine that we'd receive, which doesn't need ultra-low temperatures for storage, but we would have to have a vaccine fridge big and reliable enough to hold all the vials we'd need. (This isn't a given: GPs are obliged to buy and maintain their own clinic equipment – vaccine fridges aren't supplied by the NHS.)
我们将拿到的是牛津/阿斯利康公司的疫苗，不需要超低温来储存，但我们必须要有一个足够大、足够可靠的疫苗冰箱来储存我们需要的所有的小瓶疫苗。(这不是给定的：全科医生有义务购买和维护自己诊所的设备——NHS不提供疫苗冰箱。)
We knew it would be a challenge to juggle our normal work with all the requirements of the vaccine programme. If we committed too much of our time to vaccination, we'd lose access to patients with other medical problems. Behind the coronavirus, there are at least two shadow pandemics unfolding. First, that of all the other serious health conditions going unrecognised, because NHS attention has, by necessity, had to focus so much on the virus. Second, we're firefighting an explosion in mental health difficulties – anxiety, addictions, insomnia, depression, self-harm, psychosis – triggered not just by the virus, but by the measures we've had to take against it.
我们知道，在我们的正常工作与疫苗规划的所有要求之间寻找平衡将是一项挑战。如果我们在疫苗接种上投入太多的时间，那么我们就会失去接触有其他医疗问题的病人的机会。在新冠病毒的背后，至少有两种潜在的流行病正在上演。第一，还有其它严重的健康问题未被发现，因为毫无疑问NHS的注意力会集中在病毒上。第二，我们正在应对心理健康问题的激增——焦虑、上瘾、失眠、抑郁、自残、精神病——这些问题不仅由病毒引发，还由我们必须采取的措施引发。
Every day I hear new stories about the strain lockdown puts on kids, on marriages, on those already isolated, and I'm witnessing an epidemic of loneliness. On just one morning this week I had three separate consultations with patients for whom loneliness was, at heart, the principal problem. One of them was a desperately unhappy student, aged only 18, stuck in halls of residence, having been denied the opportunity to attend lectures or to go home. She called for help because an old habit of scratching herself – a habit she thought she'd beaten – had re-emerged. "I just can't see a way out of this," she said, "I can't see how I'm ever going to get my life back."
每天我都能听到新的故事，有关封锁给孩子、婚姻和那些已经与世隔绝的人带来的压力，我目睹了一场孤独流行病。就在这周的一个早上，我对三名患者分别进行了咨询，他们的主要问题是孤独。其中有一名学生非常不开心，她只有18岁，被困在宿舍里，被剥夺了听课和回家的机会。她打电话求助是因为自己的一个旧习——抓挠自己，她本以为自己已经改掉了，但它又出现了。“我只是看不到出路，”她说，“我不知道怎样才能恢复我原本的生活。”
