HOSPITALS IN CRISIS AS 1,000 STAFF A DAY DROP
DESPERATE hospital chiefs are battling to plug staffing holes as medics drop at the rate of nearly 1,000 a day.
London is worst-hit – with sickness absence at St Barts Trust surging from 597 to 864 in seven days as doctors and nurses went down with Covid or had to isolate. Medical director Alistair Chesser said: “We have plans in place to redeploy staff in the coming weeks should we need to.”
London’s Imperial
College Hospital has an absence rate of nearly
7% and chief executive
Professor Tim
Orchard said:
“We are having to ask some staff to move to support areas especially challenged.”
Non-urgent surgery has been postponed and there are plans to cancel further ops next month.
An intensive care consultant at a leading London hospital, who asked not to be named, said although most Omicron patients don’t end up in ICU, they clog the system. He warned: “Even being on a general ward with this mutation needs a lot of treatment.
“One of the pressures is staff going off sick or having to isolate. The bigger threat could be from the sheer lack of staff to care for patients.”
At Sheffield Teaching Hospitals, staff sickness increased from 1,409 to 1,699 over seven days. They have only seven patients in intensive care over Christmas but the trust’s Julie Phelan said: “We are lagging about ten days behind London.”
Other hospitals are faring better. Although absence at East Suffolk and North Essex hospitals is up 19%, that covers only 664 of 11,000 staff. West Hertfordshire hospitals in Watford, St Albans and Hemel Hempstead have 152 of 5,000 staff off with Covid. The trust is down 25 doctors and 38 nurses – and has six of 20 ICU beds available.
Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting said the crisis is worse due to the Tories failing to fill 100,000 NHS roles before the pandemic took hold.
He added: “It’s not just that the Tories didn’t fix the roof while the sun was shining – they dismantled the roof and removed the floorboards.”