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To ensure safe working conditions for hospital staff and to slow the spread of the disease, huge changes have been made to the way hospitals are operated.
An innovative trial of mixed-reality headsets by Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust is proving successful in reducing the amount of personal protective equipment (PPE) being used, by keeping staff and patients out of harm's way.
The mixed-reality headsets are being trialed at three hospitals in London.
Early findings have shown that using the headsets has led to a fall in the amount of time staff are spending on coronavirus wards by up to 83 percent. It is estimated that up to 700 items of PPE are saved per ward, per week.
The headsets allow images and vital information to be seen while being worn, without affecting vision. /RAZOR/ CGTN
Louis Koizia, a consultant physician and geriatrician at Imperial College Healthcare has had first-hand experience wearing the headset, which merges real and virtual worlds to produce a new environment and visualization.
"Initially, when I am walking on to the ward rounds, all I'm seeing is as though I'm wearing some glasses so it makes no difference to what I'm seeing, it doesn't affect my vision at all," said Koizia.
"I can hear the team all the time talking to me through the headphones, at the same time, when I'm asking them for pieces of information, like an X-ray for example, that will appear in my vision and then I can move that closer of further away from me or I can overlay that on top of the patients," he continued.
"At the same time, I also have a video feature, which shows me what is going on in this low-risk room where all my colleagues are, so if there's something they particularly want to show me or something that's going on, it's quite useful to be able to see what's going on in that room."
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"I can't imagine going back to my old-style ward rounds and we're only two months into it," said Koizia.
"We're using technology at such a basic level because we need it to work straight out of the box and we need it to do a job and it's done that fantastically," Koizia continued.
"I am excited about what the next couple of weeks are going to bring to us, what we're going to develop and what we're going to find out.
"I am certain that in a year's time, in two year's time, these will be used mainstream, day to day, across the country," he said.
There are hopes the use of the headsets will become more common in the near future. /RAZOR /CGTN
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Video editing: Zeb Achonu