Hospitals pushed to limit with just 26 ICU beds left in country
IRELAND’S hospitals are being pushed to the brink by Covid-19 – with just 26 available ICU beds left in the whole country yesterday.
Some hospitals in the country actually exceeded their critical care capacity. The head of the HSE yesterday described the situation as ‘extremely perilous’.
Paul Reid’s warning came as 52 further deaths of people with Covid and 2,371 new cases of the virus were confirmed.
Mr Reid warned that hospitals are almost at surge capacity after which point, he said, it will become ‘more challenging to provide the same levels of care’ to seriously ill patients.
Yesterday there were total of 318 people in intensive care units nationwide, leaving just 26 adult ICU beds free. The upper limit of the HSE’s intensive care surge capacity in is 350 beds.
‘It is advancing to an extremely perilous position for us because we have implemented our national surge plans,’ Mr Reid told RTÉ’s News At One. ‘So we are moving patients, not just within the hospital group, but including [Thursday] night, we had to move some patients from the west of the country to the east of the country,’ he added.
Cork University Hospital, in particular, is experiencing difficulty in its critical care unit.
In an email yesterday to his colleagues, the interim CEO of the hospital, Dr Gerard O’Callaghan, said: ‘Critical care capacity in CUH has been exceeded and there is an urgent need for volunteers to man 12-hour shifts over the next week.’ He added: ‘Critical care experience is not necessary; however, familiarity with the ICU would be helpful.’
A spokesman for CUH confirmed to the Irish Daily Mail last night that the email was sent out to staff yesterday. The spokesman said: ‘[The hospital] are opening additional beds, they sought support from staff to man those beds and the response so far has been positive.’ HSE chief Mr Reid said there are probably around 330 patients across the health system who are receiving advanced respiratory support outside of an ICU. ‘Generally, about two-thirds of those patients would recover and be discharged over time. But a further one-third of those can advance then towards ICU and sadly, in some cases, pass away,’ Mr Reid said. He said this was an indication that ‘the pipeline of ICU’ will soon become clogged.
Mr Reid said that there have been 2,700 admissions of Covid patients to hospital in the last 14 days, of which 163 ended up in the ICU. More than half of those, 93, who ended up in ICU were under the age of 65 – including six aged between 19 and 34 and two aged between zero and 18.
Highlighting the wide age range of those in critical condition, Mr Reid said: ‘Covid doesn’t discriminate. It certainly doesn’t spare young people either,’
The stark outlook for Irish hospitals came as health experts advising the British government said new analysis indicated the UK strain of the virus, currently found in three in five Irish cases, could be more deadly than the previous strain.