Call to use NHS as beds go unfilled

Public health officials have called on the public to seek help from the NHS if they need care for Covid-19 symptoms or other conditions, after figures revealed pop-up coronavirus hospitals are going largely unused.

Just 19 patients are being treated at the 4,000-bed NHS Nightingale hospital in London, it has been reported, adding to hopes that the UK will not exceed its intensive care capacity during the coronavirus outbreak.

Spare intensive care and general ward beds remain available even as the number of new cases remains stable and hospital admissions flatten out. Nicola Sturgeon said last week that the NHS Louisa Jordan hospital in Glasgow may not be used at all if hospital capacity is not breached.

But with hundreds of deaths in the community not being recorded in the UK’S official death toll, which only counts patients in hospital, the excess intensive care capacity has raised questions over why some people are not being admitted. “Nobody who needs NHS care in an emergency should be denied that,” said Yvonne Doyle, the medical director of Public Health England when asked about the contrasting figures. “The NHS is there for people. What we do need is much more analysis and understanding of the deaths as they occur, and that is being done regularly, so there may be very good reasons why people from care homes are not being admitted to hospital.

“What I do want to make clear is that at no time has it been said to me anywhere that the NHS would not accept a patient who needed to be admitted.”

Dr Doyle added that the government was working to include deaths in care homes as part of official UK coronavirus figures, and were compared with other countries on a like-for-like basis.