Do you have reliable information/evidence about any hospitals?

[celiafforcandle]

A family member who works at Southampton General tells me that all wards are back to their purpose. All staff are back in those wards. Theatres are working through their backlog.
A Nurse Practitioner told me that the wards at Bournemouth hospital are

not getting back to normal at all.

More statistics here than you'd ever need,

whoops

www.travellingtabby.com/uk-coronavirus-tracker/

My DM works at a very large hospital. She doesn't work in ITU but she does ward visits with Covid patients in her role. Her overtime has been stopped as of this week as numbers have declined so much.

In the last 7 days 17 covid patients have been admitted to Uni Hospital Southampton. So a ward full maybe?

If these cases don't get worse and patients leave quickly then the numbers are overall very small.

There doesn’t seem to be any apparent reason that Bournemouth’s hospital should be struggling.

A couple of thoughts (which may or may not reflect what’s actually be owing on these hospitals) ... There’s a big difference between wards being ‘back to purpose’ and things being back to ‘normal’. A lot of places are switching wards that had been repurposed during peaks back to their normal specialty now, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything like ‘normal’ because of the precautions that still need to be taken and different pathways patients come in on - acute admissions are still treated as ‘amber/red’ because of the small risk that unscreened, unisolated patients may be positive. Even with community numbers dropping, the consequences of getting one asymptomatic positive patient breathing all around the hospital would be potentially disastrous. Unscreened, unisolated patients can’t overlap with green patients having elective surgery and depending on the geography of the hospitals that may be a limiting factor. UHS is flipping massive and may have more capacity than a lot of smaller places in the region for managing different pathways.

Also, the screenshot posted by pp doesn’t tell you how many long stay covid patients Bournemouth is dealing with - just because there aren’t loads of new admissions doesn’t mean there are no patients - not sure how big their icu is, but it may be that only 1 or 2 long stay covid patients significantly impacts capacity for taking new admissions and therefore the capacity for resuming some elective stuff.

It really is all rather more complicated than ‘numbers of new infections are dropping, let’s all get back to normal’. It is going to take a long, long time to work through the backlog of work that the last 12 months has generated.

I would like to know why GP surgery and dentist in particular part of BCP still not seeing patients.

Thanks for some clues about detail behind 'purpose' and 'normal'.
Information today is that a surgery in a local Group will stop being for Covid only in mid May. So a little more progress.