NZ’s ICU capacity could double
New Zealanders need to take the coronavirus outbreak seriously and follow public health advice to stop the country becoming another Italy, an intensive care doctor says.
Dr Craig Carr, the New Zealand chair of the Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Society (ANZICS), said intensive care units (ICUs) around the country were busy preparing for possible Covid-19 cases.
‘‘We’ve currently got 221 ICU ventilated beds in New Zealand, and the community is working very hard to make sure that we can at least double that in exceptional circumstances. At the moment, things are in place to do that.’’
People who become seriously unwell with coronavirus develop pneumonia, and about 5 per cent of all cases require intensive care. Ventilators are machines that help people struggling to breathe by delivering air in and out of the lungs.
There has been some confusion about the number of ICU beds in New Zealand. A February update from the Ministry of Health put the number at 176 plus another 57 high-dependency beds (which had one nurse per two patients), while a 2018 ANZICS report says there are 251, including paediatric beds.
Carr said the way beds were counted varied, as hospitals had the ability to create additional ICU beds. He was confident there were 221 adult ICU beds with ventilators, one nurse per patient, monitoring equipment and pumps to administer medicine.
In Italy, where there have been at least 31,506 confirmed coronavirus cases and more than 2500 deaths, intensive care units have been overwhelmed and doctors have had to make difficult decisions about who to admit.
Carr, the clinical director of Dunedin Hospital’s ICU, said New Zealand intensive care specialists had learned from what their colleagues in Italy and China were facing. ICU clinical directors and charge nurses were meeting regularly via video conference to plan their response, he said.
‘‘We’re able to do that because we’ve kept the virus low in this country so far and because we were warned by the Italians and the Chinese of their experience.’’
Asked how he felt about what ICU specialists were dealing with in Italy, Carr said it was distressing.
‘‘They are in the most extraordinary and harrowing times,’’ he said, adding that was why people in New Zealand were being urged to follow measures to slow the spread of the virus, including social distancing, proper hand washing and selfisolation.
‘‘If we can avoid things getting to the stage of Italy and China then basically lots and lots of people will have their lives saved.’’
Carr said there were more ventilators than ICU beds in New Zealand. His ICU had 10 intensive care beds and two highdependency beds, but he said he regularly used those as intensive care beds, too, by increasing staff numbers.
There were also six spare ventilators, and ventilators for moving patients around the hospital. Each operating theatre also had a ventilator that could, if necessary, be used for coronavirus patients.
In a statement earlier this week, a Ministry of Health spokeswoman said the ministry acknowledged the current number of ICU and high-dependency beds might not meet demand if coronavirus became widespread in the community.
Part of the $12.1 billion economic package announced by the Government this week was $32m to increase ICU capacity.
‘‘Additional capacity could be sourced from the private sector, and the ability to change a limited number of beds into higher level care,’’ the ministry spokeswoman said.