HOSPITAL nurses who have been forced to leave their families due to their work on the frontline have been offered stunning showhomes to live in.

Property developer, Redrow, have offered their plush pads at Westley Green in Basildon to NHS nurses who cannot live at home due to the risk of spreading coronavirus to their loved ones.

One of the first nurses to temporarily move into the homes, worth up to £800,000 each, was Jade Rivers from Billericay.

The 27-year-old is one of the intensive treatment unit nurses at the Essex Cardiothoracic Centre at Basildon Hospital. She has been pulled in from Colne Ward, where she and her team provide intensive care treatment for patients following heart and lung surgery, to help care for coronavirus patients while the crisis continues.

She praised Dr Nick Trafford from the Essex Cardiothoracic Centre for helping to organise the scheme.

She said: “I don’t know what I would have done if Nick hadn’t organised this, I would probably be trying to fund some sort of accommodation myself.

“My dad is on immune suppressant drugs and two other people in my household are high risk so the safest thing was for me to leave because of the risk of bringing anything home as we are on the frontline.

“It was my main concern, so I want to thank Redrow Homes for accommodating me and fellow colleagues from ITU.

“We do our absolute best for our patients but we were anxious that we were putting our families at risk - now we don’t have to worry.

“The compassion from the community is heartwarming as so many businesses and individuals are offering to support us NHS staff in so many ways.”

Perfusionist, Dr Trafford currently lives in one of the homes on the site so got in touch with the customer services team at Redrow to ask if staff could use the homes after they had shut up shop and halted building works due to the pandemic.

He said: “I didn’t think it would come to anything, but after I spoke with Kerry at Redrow she told us they would love to. I picked up the keys to the fully furnished, beautiful show homes and there were boxes of PPE too.

“They really went above and beyond. They didn’t have to do this, they have been brilliant.”

A perfusion scientist puts the patient on circulatory support to keep them alive while they are having cardiac surgery. The heart must be stopped before it is operated on, so the patient’s circulatory and respiratory function must be replaced.

Dr Trafford, added: “We are not performing as much cardiac surgery now because of Covid-19 and we are looking after Covid patients on ITU.

“But 40 per cent of staff are off sick or self-isolating while the remaining 60 per cent are trying to do all they can with a 300 per cent increase in patients.”

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