Third of critical care patients have Covid-19

MORE than a third of patients in critical care in Wales have Covid.

A doctor working on the front line has said that operating at that capacity will lead to a fall in standards.

Speaking on the BBC Politics Wales programme, intensive care consultant Dr Jack Parry-jones said more than 35% of patients in critical care currently have Covid.

While he said that at the worst stage of the first wave it was 90%, staff are currently under “enormous pressure” and “standards of care will fall”.

“Every week, our baseline critical care capacity in Wales is 152 beds, which is the fewest per head of the population in the UK.

“We’re currently running at 123% capacity and of those over 35% of them have been taken out with patients with Coronavirus infection.”

Wales’s seven-day coronavirus infection rate has now reached the highest level since the pandemic began, it has been revealed.

Dr Parry-jones said: “The difficulty with Covid is the time it takes people to get better. So a quarter of patients with Coronavirus will take over 30 days before they get better, so that’s the survivors. Those people that die in critical care with Covid, those patients whilst we’re trying to save them, they still take a significant period of time in critical care.

“So our staff are under an enormous amount of pressure running at that kind of capacity.

“When you’re running at that kind of capacity, standards of care will fall and we really struggle across the critical care sector with staffing and that’s mainly or particularly nurse staffing, but actually all staffing is extremely difficult.”

Asked if critical care was reaching its limit, Dr Parry Jones said: “We can flex up. So at the worst stage in the first wave, over 90% of patients in critical care had Covid, we had over 200 patients across Wales.

“We can do it, but the problem is standards fall and it’s very very difficult for staff.”