The hospital I work in is so quiet

[QuietHospital]

London hospital.
Half empty. Some wards have less than a handful of patients, some wards are closed. Most staff have been moved to wards so are falling over selves. While their regular work goes undone.
A&E very quiet. I’ve sent patients there who are seen immediately. The heart attacks, strokes and appendicitis cases are presenting too late. People with covid are waiting too long to present. If you get breathless then for goodness sake come in. I’m so cross at the initial advice to stay home until struggling.
Had a look through covid ward lists and vast majority patients are aged over 70. Hardly any patients under 60, those who are have underlying health problems for the most part. Lots more men than women affected.
It’s just a snapshot but echoed by colleagues in other hospitals.
I think we can / should start to move back to normal life soon for the well young people among us. I fear for the short and longer term economic hit. It’s crazy to have all these young well people furloughed or made redundant.

My mum is waiting for a lung transplant and the cut off date due to her age is fast approaching. I really don't think it will happen at all now, so our last hope at her having a few more years with a decent quality of live feels like it's been snatched away

I know of a patient currently on a ventilator who was fobbed off twice following 999 calls before finally being admitted. If hospitals are so busy why aren’t patients being admitted until they are literally unable to breathe? Why aren’t ordinary people being admitted for precautionary oxygen treatment if there’s so much free space and available resources? In Germany they admit COVID patients much earlier and have had far better outcomes. If we have the capacity then we should be doing the same.

We are getting busier with RTC and self harm related trauma. The Covid admissions seem to be settling.

Please come in if you’re not well. Or see your GP. I’ve had so many patients tell me they can’t see their GP because they perceive it to be closed. I’m really worried about everyone we’re not treating.

Same here in. 3 weeks ago all AL for hospital workers in April was cancelled - now they're begging staff to re-book time off.

People are finishing at lunchtime and spending the rest of the day doing odds and ends like any outstanding training.

ITU is busy but very well staffed. Rest of the hospital is half-empty, and getting emptier by the day as the COVID patients move on. And yet all day there are takeaway food deliveries being made to the nursing staff and pallets of Amazon deliveries brought on site for the workers all paid for by the local community. I'm still seeing posts on local Facebook groups about exhausting 12 hour shifts and people kicking off at a couple having a picnic because "their DC is disabled and so would lose the 'ventilator lottery'". I don't understand why it's not being highlighted more in the media.

V quiet here too, not just hospitals. One night last week or our of hours service saw no patients. Unheard of.

I work in mental health, not nhs but liaise closely with them all the time. Their in patient wards are still busy, no change there. There's a push to try and get people out quickly discharged from sections etc so if needs be they can have covid wards and non covid wards.

AED however is reportedly empty, if someone is at high risk and needs hospital presently e.g for an overdose they are in and triaged straight away...usually be at least 5 hours.

@The80sweregreat I have been, twice. I was referred for an urgent MRI scan in January, but the phone call last week was to tell me that the consultant can't examine me in person due to Covid. They could tell me that the scan had ruled out one particular thing, but that still left several other possibilities - but I would need to be examined again. This can't happen while Covid is going on. So I have to be discharged, and then put myself back on the list when it re-opens in three months' time. When there will, obviously, be a huge backlog. So I will have been in such pain that I can't walk or sleep for a year, by the time I next see someone.

I will also be an alcoholic, as the only thing that very slightly takes the edge off it is prescription painkillers (one of which was prescribed sight unseen; I refused to take anything opiate-derived) and alcohol.

I do keep reading that more people might die from not having the virus than do have it because of all the changes to clinics and cancelling treatments. It's so sad.

Why send patients to the Nightingale if there are so many empty beds. Private hospitals are saying they are twiddling their thumbs so why cant they take on routine nhs work. Are the wards empty because they need deep cleaning.

Surely the fact that we've ben locked down for 4 weeks has caused the hospitals to not become overwhelmed - if they'd let everyone carry on as normal, the hospitals would have been overwhelmed.

It's like all safety measures - if a safety/precautionary measure actually works, and disaster is averted, people always wonder whether the safety measure was actually necessary. In my view, the lockdown was, and is, necessary. We're still having hundreds of hospital corona deaths a day.

loutypips

@LilacTree1 thank you for asking. I have made it through the day. Became poorly last Tuesday, but since last Wednesday I've been at my worst. Absolutely no energy, weakness, dizziness, sore back/throat/chest, fatigue. Just generally feeling very very unwell. I can't get help anywhere as keep getting told I'm not blue.

@Didiplanthis I had an appointment booked with the GP for last week. It was booked 4 weeks prior to this. I had a generic text when we went into lockdown saying all appts were phone. They never phoned, and when I contacted them they said it had just been cancelled, couldn't be phone appt and it wouldn't be rebooked. I couldn't rebook until all this was over. Luckily it's not life threatening but it doesn't help people are told 'no, we aren't booking anything' ☹️

@pasanda that's interesting re maternity ward. I can imagine people being able to ignore some things they might usually go to hospital for, but having a baby is pretty...certain! Why do you think numbers are so low on maternity? Are people opting for home births? (Vested interest, as I'm due to give birth in a few weeks and am freaking out about it being busy and cramped, and me or the baby catching something).

Same here. I’m a midwife and we are soooooo quiet. Almost no-one coming in with reduced movements or other concerns. People not turning up to scans etc. It’s very worrying as it makes me wonder what is being missed and what will the fall out be from all those missed opportunities.

We bumped into some friends on a walk the other day who are both consultants in a large hospital in the south west who said the same thing. If the justification for lockdown was to avoid overloading the NHS then it seems we’ve achieved that, especially considering that I’ve heard the nightingale hospitals are almost empty, then why on earth shouldn’t we partially lift lockdown in the next week or so? The long term economic damage, late presentation of illnesses, and the associated long term health impacts that go with poverty increase the longer we leave it, and these all impact younger people more so have a bigger impact on total human years damaged overall.

The thing is we need to start letting some people out now or else if everyone comes out of lockdown at once we’ll just create a fresh wave of covid patients surely!

@loutypips

This is a very interesting thread, thank you for starting it.

Spoke to a relative who is a ward sister in a fairly large hospital on the edge of the midlands. She's been redeployed and kept to the clean side of things as she's asthmatic but is bored rigid with a half filled ward and worried that they should be fuller. She usually works on ortho surgical so a lot of elderly hips but all of that obviously cancelled.

Their covid wards are fairly busy but managing with plenty of spare icu beds and staff. We were talking about the peak and her view is that if this is it (all things crossed) they've not got staffing right and she's been pulled in to do shifts where she's just not needed.

Strange everyone is saying the same but it’s a different story to the early pleading calls to radio etc.

Also what you hear about 111 slow to triage.

Would’ve good to get a full picture with numbers.

This thread is an interesting read. Several cohorts of student nurses have opted to be deployed as non-supernumerary staff, those in the last six months of their training will be on a Band 4. It doesn't sound like there will be that much work for them to do.

The problem is EVERYTHING stopped for covid. Some of it was hospital choice and some of it was patients being too scared to come in or under the impression that they shouldn’t. In my opinion we stopped too much too soon. We could reverse this fairly quickly but my worry is we won’t. Like lockdown rumbling on for months.

Everything stopped for covid and our ICU is busy but covid patients are left in the community. All those empty beds could be used for earlier stage covid and then perhaps our outcomes may improve