London’s hospitals are set to be overrun by Covid in a couple of weeks and may be short of thousands of beds due to the crisis.
NHS England London medical director Vin Diwakar told other medical directors of London’s hospital trusts of his bleak predictions on a Zoom call.
The presentation showed that the NHS in London would be short of nearly 2,000 general and acute and intensive care beds in the “best case” scenario by January 19 .
This scenario is based on the number of Covid patients growing at the lowest rate considered likely, and measures to increase capacity such as opening the capital’s Nightingale hospital being successful.
Professor of intensive care medicine and a consultant at the Royal London, Rupert Pearse, urged people to abide by the “stay at home” lockdown message. Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he said:
“Right now we are diluting down to one (ICU) nurse to three (patients) and filling those gaps with untrained staff and in some instances doctors helping nurses deliver their care… and we’re even facing diluting that further to one in four.
As intensive care doctors, we’re not sure how we can together deliver the quality of care that we need to. We are really very concerned now about the seriousness of the situation… which is definitely worse than the first wave and proving much harder to deal with now as the resources we had in the first wave aren’t available to us. So we’re really struggling to provide the quality of patient care that we think patients deserve. And the impact of the pandemic is taking care away from other illnesses such as cancer and heart disease. In essence, the healthcare available to all of us is not as good as it should be right now.”
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