Will equipment fit through front door?

GREAT Ormond Street Hospital fiercely denied putting up obstacles to stop Charlie’s parents taking him home – yet insisted their flat would need transforming into an intensive care unit.

A full paediatric intensive care team of up to three doctors and six nurses working in shifts around the clock would be required, they said.

Specialist equipment including a ventilator which ‘does not fit through the front door’ would need to be taken to his home, and ‘there are then stairs to negotiate and corners to turn’. Then there is a ‘gas supply which requires a health and safety assessment’, the court heard. Physical access for a special bed was also needed.

Victoria Butler-Cole, a barrister representing Charlie’s guardian, said Great Ormond Street had also told her: ‘The provision of intensive care in a home setting needs to be licensed.’

The judge said it was difficult to argue with all this. But speaking for the family, barrister Grant Armstrong poured scorn on the need for such a big operation. He said Charlie was stable, there was no evidence that he was in pain, and patients were ‘routinely’ allowed to be ventilated at home. A portable ventilator was no larger than an electric heater, he suggested, and there were no stairs to the parents’ groundfloor flat – which he said Great Ormond Street had never visited.

He said Connie Yates had found agencies willing to supply nurses round the clock and a doctor would only need to be on call. Last night an NHS source told the Daily Mail the most common ventilators in paediatric intensive care units ‘are about the size of a PC computer’.