New Year s Eve: inside Northern Ireland s Nightingale Hospital in Belfast, there s growing unease among medical professionals who may soon have to decide who lives and who dies.
The frightening reality, says Gardiner, is the current trajectory does not bode well. When I have to make a really difficult decision - if we get to the point if resources won t go far enough - I hear no voice that says, we support you in whatever decision you have to make, ethically or socially . How do we decide which people get a longer time in critical care or who gets it in the first place?
He admits that conundrum keeps him up at night and is not a medical decision but a social, political and economic decision .
Inside this hospital, there s the constant ringing of alarms, the noise of the ventilators that are keeping patients alive and the arrival of more very sick people.