City’s intensive care wards are feeling pressure
HOSPITALS’ BEDS OFFER TO REST OF UK REACHING CAPACITY
NEWCASTLE hospitals could stop taking in seriously ill Covid patients from the South of England due to escalating pressure on local NHS services.
It emerged last week that some patients had been transferred hundreds of miles to Tyneside from overstretched intensive care units elsewhere in the country.
But a North East hospital boss says that offer of help may soon have to end.
Dame Jackie Daniel, chief executive of the Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, told other city leaders on Wednesday morning that their capacity to accept extra patients was being considered “very carefully”.
She told the Newcastle City Futures Board that the trust, which runs the Royal Victoria Infirmary and Freeman Hospital, had been accepting two patients per day from elsewhere in the UK for around a week and a half, plus two or three from other North East hospitals. Dame Jackie added that she was due to speak with health secretary Matt Hancock on Wednesday afternoon and was “very very clear on where the red lines are” in terms of hospital capacity in Newcastle. She added: “There is a point where we won’t be able to offer any further support and we will be really clear when we get to that.”
Newcastle City Council leader Nick Forbes told the board meeting that the fact our local NHS services had capacity to take patients from elsewhere is “tribute to the dedication and sacrifice of people in our part of the world” who have spent months under some form of local Covid restrictions.
He added that he was “quite upset and angry” at people questioning why Newcastle was taking Covid patients from outside the region, saying: “That is not how our NHS works and that is not our culture as a city, in terms of turning away people in need.”
While infection rates in the North East have not soared as dramatically as other parts of England, particularly London and the South
East, Dame Jackie said
NHS services here still remain “very, very pressured”.
She added: “I have to be really clear about the significant pressure we are facing in hospitals. I chair our command cell with all the regional hospitals on this and at the moment we are meeting every day, which I hope gives some indication of the stress levels we are facing. I think that is predominantly due to numbers, because our numbers are the same as they were in the first peak – that overall severity in terms of the number of Covid patients.
“That is being felt pretty evenly across the North East. there are pockets in a slightly more severe position, Cumbria and for different reasons South Tees on their critical care. The important thing for Newcastle Hospitals is that we are the major trauma centre, we are the cancer centre, we are the neonatal centre, we are the major paediatric centre, and we have the largest volume of critical care capacity.
“We are at a point now where we are considering the ability to take national patients very carefully, because what we are also finding is that there are a lot of transfers of critical care patients across the region itself.
“I am feeling optimistic because I hope we are going to see a flattening in terms of levels of pressure in hospitals, but it is important to say that we are not seeing that just right now and I don’t think we will see it probably until the early part of next week.”