Covid wards 'full of children' for first time in pandemic, warn nurses

https://news.yahoo.com/covid-wards-full-children-first-145710680.html

 

The Telegraph
Patrick Sawer
Fri, January 1, 2021, 9:57 AM EST

Medics are starting to see “whole wards of children” suffering from Covid for the first time during the pandemic, a senior nurse has warned.

Laura Duffell, a matron at King’s College Hospital, London, said the new strain of Covid was affecting children and younger adults with no underlying health conditions in worrying numbers.

She said: “It’s very different. That’s what makes it so much scarier for us as doctors, nurses and porters and everyone else who is working on the front line.

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Consultants and nursing leaders say that high levels of nursing vacancies, coupled with high numbers of staff themselves going off sick with coronavirus or stress will make it near impossible to use the Nightingale hospitals built around the country at the start of the pandemic.

The makeshift hospitals were built at sites across England at an estimated cost of £220million, including in London, Manchester, Bristol, Sunderland, Harrogate, Exeter and Birmingham.

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There are already one in eight nursing vacancies, with existing shortages in the type of Intensive Care Unit nurses needed to treat the most severely ill Covid patients, and recent figures showed that one in 10 Covid admissions to hospital are front line health workers - depriving the NHS of badly-needed staff.

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The warnings came as the picture across hospitals struggling to cope with a spike in Covid cases grows ever more serious, with consultants estimating that London hospitals are now operating at more than 200 per cent over capacity and even those hospitals in regions not as badly affected by the current wave working at 150 per cent over capacity.

Clinicians say this means beds being placed closer together to make space, increasing the risk of cross infection between patients, and other Covid beds being moved into “every corner” of a hospital. Some major London hospitals have been forced to treat Covid-19 patients in ambulances.

As a result a growing number of non-Covid patients are having to wait longer for potentially life saving treatment for conditions such as cancer.

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