Warning that health service will struggle if hospital workers fall ill
Doctors call for plan on staffing and more critical care beds
SOME OF the UK’s most senior health professionals have urged the Government to intensify its emergency planning for the coronavirus pandemic, as Health Secretary Matt Hancock admitted the NHS desperately needs more ventilators to tackle the outbreak.
Engineers have already been asked to draw up plans to produce more ventilators in the UK, amid concerns critical care facilities will come under intense pressure as the Covid-19 crisis escalates.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson will urge manufacturers to shift their production lines to build ventilators, as the NHS prepares for a significant increase in cases of Covid-19.
He will today call on manufacturers to join a “national effort” to produce equipment for the NHS.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock said: “We start with around 5,000 ventilators, we think we need many times more than that, and we are saying if you produce a ventilator then we will buy it. No number is too high.”
He added: “They are relatively complicated pieces of kit, I couldn’t make one, but they’re not so complicated that the advanced manufacturing that this country is so good at now can’t be able to turn its production lines over to.
“We’ve been talking to a whole host of companies about it and the Prime Minister is hosting a conference call today with them to say very clearly to the nation’s manufacturers, ventilators are the thing that we are going to need, and frankly, right across the world, the demand for them is incredibly high, so it is not possible to produce too many.
“So anybody who can should turn production and their engineering minds over to the production of ventilators.”
The British Medical Association stressed that the Government must prioritise the testing of doctors for coronavirus to ensure adequate resources during the pandemic, while the Society for Acute Medicine warned one of the biggest issues facing the NHS in tackling the outbreak is staffing.
Dr Chaand Nagpaul, the chairman of the Council of the British
Medical Association, said he “can’t emphasise enough how serious the problem is” if numerous healthcare workers are self-isolating, and he urged the Government to ensure that GP practices can run “in a normal fashion”.
He added that the UK does
Dr Nick Scriven, a consultant in acute medicine at Halifax Hospital. not have “the luxury of time any more” and called on Mr Johnson and Mr Hancock to provide healthcare workers with “clear, decisive plans” immediately.
“Our starting position unfortunately has been far worse than many of our European nations – we have about a quarter of the critical care beds that Germany has, as an example, so it’s really critical, it’s really important that we now see transparently what plans the Government has to expand that capacity,” Dr Nagpaul said.
Dr Nick Scriven, the Society for Acute Medicine’s immediate past president, said the health service will struggle when staff fall sick and while the number of intensive care beds can be increased, there are not enough specialist nurses to work on them.
Dr Scriven, a consultant in acute medicine at Halifax Hospital, said: “The biggest concern I have in terms of management of Covid-19 is staff and what happens when hospital and community workers become ill or go into isolation. Or when schools close and NHS staff have to look after young families.”
He added that the NHS was already “under-provisioned” for
critical care beds compared to a lot of other countries “but if the worst case scenario occurs, then no feasible ‘normal’ numbers would be sufficient”.
He said: “The staff numbers are the main concern as nursing on intensive care is highly-specialised and concentrated so it’s not that easy to draft people in to help.”
The Government said yesterday that the health service will stop non-urgent surgery and is to announce a training programme to retrain medics from other specialisms to help those who become very ill with Covid-19.
What happens when hospital and community workers become ill?