SCOTS NHS ON WAR FOOTING
Non-urgent surgery axed as service put on three-month high alert
NHS SCOTLAND staff have been put on an ‘emergency footing’ for at least three months as the fight against deadly coronavirus is ramped up.
Non-urgent operations will be cancelled to help double the number of intensive care beds available and increase overall hospital capacity by 3,000.
Retired doctors and nurses along with senior medical students will be deployed in hospitals to help deal with an expected spike in cases in coming days.
Officials are also working with private healthcare providers in an effort to maximise bed capacity.
Health Secretary Jeane Freeman announced the measures yesterday following the death of a second person diagnosed with the virus north of the Border.
The elderly patient, who was being treated by NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, had an underlying health condition.
There have been 195 people diagnosed with coronavirus in Scotland, but Miss Freeman said the true figure is likely to be ‘substantially higher’.
Speaking at Holyrood yesterday, she said the NHS faced a likely surge in the number of patients requiring ventilators and intensive care treatment.
Miss Freeman added: ‘To respond to Covid-19 requires a swift, radical change in the way our NHS does its work.
‘It is nothing short of the most rapid reconfiguration of our health service in its 71year history. That’s why today I am formally placing our NHS on an emergency footing for at least the next three months.
‘I am giving my instructions to NHS Scotland and the individual health boards to do all that is necessary to be ready to face a substantial and sustained increase in the cases of Covid-19.’
Miss Freeman said: ‘Our goal is simple – to protect and save
‘We may have to ask for more’
lives. I know we’ve asked a lot of the people of Scotland but in the weeks and months to come we may have to ask for more.’
She said current bed capacity is 13,000 but it was hoped that cancelling non-urgent elective operations would help to boost this by 3,000.
However, the Health Secretary stressed that ‘vital’ cancer treatments, emergency care, maternity services and urgent medical procedures would continue as usual.
Patients whose operations had been cancelled will, she said, remain on waiting lists until it is ‘clinically appropriate’ for surgery to go ahead.
The NHS is, Miss Freeman said, seeking to boost staffing numbers ‘by working with regulators to enable returners to the healthcare profession, and by looking to deploy senior students in both nursing, allied health professions and medicine into settings appropriate to their skills’.
She added: ‘As we work to suppress this infection we will continue a strong testing regime that will ensure key workers, such as frontline NHS staff, will be tested so that they do not self-isolate unnecessarily’. Miss Freeman said that the ‘safety and wellbeing of our hard-working NHS staff is a huge priority’.
Calling it a ‘watershed moment in our nation, in our world and most certainly in our NHS’, she added: ‘This is going to take everyone, we all have a responsibility and we need everyone’s help.’
Nicola Sturgeon confirmed that all those most vulnerable to the virus, including those aged over 70, with compromised immune systems, will be contacted by GPs and other healthcare workers.
Meanwhile, some GP surgeries have asked patients not to attend in person after staff contracted coronavirus.
Crookston Medical Centre in Glasgow confirmed that a GP had tested positive and it had switched to video and phone consultations while the practice is ‘thoroughly cleaned’.
Patients at two practices at Hay Lodge Health Centre in Peebles have been told not to attend in person after a member of staff tested positive and others began self-isolating. The practices are taking phone appointments.