What is the real situation in hospitals?

[Purplehaze34]

It’s hard to tell from the media and I have no friends or family who work for the NHS.

Does anyone work in a hospital? What is it like regarding the Covid situation there? Are ICUs/critical care extremely busy?

It will vary from hospital to hospital depending on the population. Why do you want to know?

The nhs publishes the data. I can't answer your question but I know dh monitors local admissions

I wanted to ask because media seem to swing from there being lots of admissions in hospitals then other times reporting hospitals quieter than usual.

Just interested in the truth.

It's going to vary massively between hospitals. My local hospital is really busy with covid, but I'm in an area with a lot of cases, other areas will have very few admitted. There are 15,000 people in hospital with covid at the moment so its definitely putting pressure on beds somewhere, we just dont have much spare capacity in the system.

I would suggest watching the BBC2 documentary Hospital. Last nights episode is really good at giving a flavour of the issues. It's not just about numbers of covid, it's about all the inter-related issues and how hospitals are a house of cards!

It will depend where you are but in the Northwest they are very full and busy. Greater Manchester hospitals are back to only doing urgent and cancer surgery and are using the Nightingale hospital for non covid patients to make capacity. The NHS usually struggles in winter anyway but with the rate of COVID admissions it's going to be worse this winter

Thanks, that’s interesting to know. I’m in Greater Manchester, the rates are very high here. Many people here seem to playing down the Covid rates.

It depends where you live.

First wave hit the south harder, London hospitals were struggling.

Cases moved north, second wave higher in the North and now hospitals there struggling but hospitals in London are less busy this time.

It depends what angle the media want to push.

And what angle the govt. want to push, for instance before this lockdown the govt reported on 29 hospitals being far busier this wave then the last but there are 400+ hospitals.

Interestingly they did t report on the average position of all 400 as they wanted compliance with the second lockdown and were under pressure not to maintain a north/south divide In rules and restrictions.

Before I got my second shielding letter, there was only one positive bed left in critical care at my hospital. There’s over 300 covid patients as of yesterday morning.

A friend is a doctor in a Manchester hospital.
The wards she usually works in have all been turned into Covid wards again.
She is exhausted again and working extra shifts (supposed to be part time as she has 3 young children) BUT did say that far more patients are getting better than last time when they felt they passed them up to intensive care and they never returned.
More can be treated in the wards and discharged from there, and more that have to go to ICU then return to recover sufficiently for discharge.

Daily hospital stats here (covid admissions, beds occupied, ventilators, etc) here - broken down by area:

www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-hospital-activity/

A&E nurse in a Greater Manchester hospital here.

Red (covid +)ICU is full, but there is still capacity to extend into theater recovery if needs be, but not necessarily the staff to do so.

Four general medical wards have gone Red in their entirety.

Apart from two specialised wards that are kept Green (clean) because of the nature of the speciality, most wards will have Covid + patients in their side rooms.

As for us in A&E, we are busy, not bonkers busy, not unmanigably busy, but busy. Our main issue is that there are no beds. If you are potentially Covid + and need to be admitted then you need to be admitted to a side room. But that relies on patients elsewhere in the hospital being able to come out of side rooms ... which is where the main problem lies for us. A 6-8 hour wait for a medical bed is fairly standard at present.

Placemarking as I'd like to hear first hand from those working in hospitals what their experiences are.

Ah, just seen Shop's post..

There's no one truth though, every hospital is different so be wary of generalisations either way.

Are you worried that you might need to go into hospital? In that case you'd only need to know about your own hospital, I think I read that some hospitals do publish their own data

I know someone who works at a local hospital in previous tier 1. All elective ops are being cancelled. ICU is full for Covid patients. Getting very busy.

BIL works in a London ICU, says it isnt too bad yet.

www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-hospital-activity/

This breaks it down to nhs trust and was last updated last week

@Scarby9

A friend is a doctor in a Manchester hospital. The wards she usually works in have all been turned into Covid wards again. She is exhausted again and working extra shifts (supposed to be part time as she has 3 young children) BUT did say that far more patients are getting better than last time when they felt they passed them up to intensive care and they never returned. More can be treated in the wards and discharged from there, and more that have to go to ICU then return to recover sufficiently for discharge.

This is what I'm finding as an intensive care nurse. A lot more people who've come to us have thankfully recovered this time. My hospital is full of covid on a ward level but on intensive care, it's about half covid and half other conditions at the moment.

Why do you think that is? Better understanding of the virus or more of the less serious cases coming in?

Doctor friend at Hillingdon in London says not bad at all there at the moment. They had their peak in March and it was awful.

The majority of Covid patients in my local hospital are not people presenting with Covid symptoms but those picked up by routine testing whilst presenting with something else.

Nottingham has just over 300 cases at the minute. No idea about ITU capacity as I'm in paediatrics and that's pretty much business As usual.

SE London and friend at local hospital said ICU is now at full capacity and they are reopening theatres as ICU beds. It has gone from very quiet to this in less than two weeks.