Warning as no intensive care beds left in a fifth of major hospitals
ONE in five major hospitals in England has no spare intensive care beds.
Health bosses warn the next few weeks ‘will be the most testing in NHS history’.
Amid growing fears that care for the most seriously ill may have to be rationed, all hospitals not yet at full capacity are being asked to open hundreds more intensive care beds so they can take in patients from the worst-hit areas.
Hospitals in the Midlands will be asked to take ‘significant’ numbers from London and eastern England under the plans for a ‘national critical care service’. Patients in the Midlands may then be sent to Yorkshire and the North East, to even out the burden.
The ‘intolerable strain’ of Covid-19 means life-saving organ transplants and urgent cancer surgery are being cancelled. Doctors in London say they are being forced to return severely ill patients to ambulances because there are no beds in hospitals.
Boris Johnson warned on Wednesday there was a ‘very substantial’ risk that the NHS will run out of intensive care beds. At 27 of England’s 140 acute hospital trusts, intensive care units were 100 per cent full on January 10 – the latest date with available NHS data.
Those reporting no spare capacity include University Hospitals Birmingham, England’s largest NHS Trust, which has filled all 147 of its intensive care beds. There are 3,307 Covid patients on ventilators in intensive care beds in England – more than double the number on Christmas Day.
The unprecedented use of ‘super-surge’ capacity will see each intensive care nurse looking after four patients, when normally it is one or two.
NHS chiefs warned the next few weeks ‘will be the most testing in NHS history’, with pressures exacerbated by staff shortages.
Nearly 100,000 are off work, including one in ten hospital nurses. Half of the absent staff either have Covid or are self-isolating.