Forum Topic

London hospital declares critical incident

A major London hospital has declared a ‘critical incident’ after running out of ICU beds due to a surge in coronavirus cases. The situation has been described as ‘f***ing petrifying’ by a senior hospital director in the capital, where the scale of the disease is weeks ahead of the rest of the country. In a message to staff, Northwick Park Hospital in Harrow said it has no critical care capacity left and has contacted neighbouring hospitals about transferring patients who need critical care to other sites. The message, seen by the Health Service Journal (HSJ), said: ‘I am writing to let you know that we have this evening declared a ‘critical incident’ in relation to our critical care capacity at Northwick Park Hospital. This is due to an increasing number of patients with Covid-19.Read more: https://metro.co.uk/2020/03/20/london-hospital-declares-critical-incident-running-intensive-care-beds-12431589/?ito=cbshare Twitter: https://twitter.com/MetroUK | Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MetroUK/

Bernard Allen ● 2420d15 Comments

Major incident already declared over as beds were released inside 24 hours!

N V Brooks ● 2420d

Expect more of this to come. See Italy for details.

Ken Munn ● 2420d

Why would anyone be surprised? A decade of grotesque misgovernment has left the NHS sickenly unprepared for what is fast becoming the biggest crisis in its history. It didn’t have to be like this. Germany has 25,000 intensive care beds, with full respiratory equipment, and is doubling capacity, France has 7,000 IC beds and Italy 5,000, with many more on the way. And the UK? We have barely 4,000 IC beds, 17,000 fewer standard beds than a decade ago, none of the 5,000 additional GPs promised by Cameron in 2015 and a chronic shortage of nurses.Result: UK Covid19 mortality rate has shot up from nowhere a couple of weeks ago to fourth highest (4.6%) in Europe.When this is all over some very very hard questions are going to have to be answered by this bunch of mendacious chancers masquerading as our government.

Anthony Warwick-Ching ● 2420d

The NHS was suffering before Conservatives took over but most conveniently forget about that, they had been fighting other infections MRSA etc., the cleaning of wards and closing of wards for intense cleaning etc., also all those breast operations on women that were not necessary.

Janice Evans ● 2420d

The NHS has many faults but for the mostpart is still one of the best services in the world.No government can base its plans/projections for the NHS based on something like Coronavirus which 6 months ago did not exist.

Jeffrey Cope ● 2420d

Janice Evans, Why didn’t the tories fix those problems, instead of making them worse, far far worse? They have been swimming in money. Since 2010 the tories have borrowed on a scale beyond the realms of fantasy: £800 billion (Office for National Statistics, Institute for Fiscal Studies). This is more than all previous peace time governments, more than all Labour governments since the dawn of history. But there is nothing, absolutely nothing to show for it. And now the victims of Covid19 will pay the price of tory folly. It is disgusting beyond words.

Anthony Warwick-Ching ● 2420d

This is the problem they have to fix everything when they do get back in and still take the blame for everything, blame, blame, blame continually

Janice Evans ● 2420d

AWC, oh dear!Did you forget the parlous situation that Labour left the country in after the crash?

Jeffrey Cope ● 2420d

You're wrong.  That was a global crisis started in the USA engineered by mortgage brokers selling mortgages to people who had no hope of ever keeping up the payments.  The Americans should have supported Lehman Brothers instead of letting them fail and producing the massive crisis in confidence in global markets and imminent global collapse only prevented by truly massive Govt interventions similar to the interventions now being made.

Philippa Bond ● 2420d

Modern neo-liberal tories try to reduce public spending as an article of faith.  This was not true of post-war so called one-nation tories who were wiser in this respect and realised the virtues of a mixed economy. Their dogma about reducing public spending has led to a much reduced NHS capability in stark contrast to our European neighbours.  The need to protect the emasculated NHS from the virus has led to extreme Govt intervention into the national economy forcing the Govt to abandon its core fallacious economic beliefs.Here's Bill Gates' Ted talk of 2015:https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_the_next_outbreak_we_re_not_ready/up-next?language=enWe shouldn't be surprised if Govt takes no heed of warnings from its own experts and the likes of Bill Gates that we have been unprepared.

Philippa Bond ● 2420d

I disagree Phillipa : it was all banks from many countries,the supposedly well-managed and fiscally conservative German banks being a major contributor to that crisis :German Banks Worst Hit By Financial Crisis - Newsweekwww.newsweek.com › german-banks-worst-hit-financial-crisis-8046311 Jun 2009 - EU Commissioner Günter Verheugen last month slammed German banks for having been "world champions in risky banking transactions." BaFin, the German financial regulator, leaked a list in April that put German banks' troubled assets at €800 billion, a figure the agency has since denied.

Ben Gemmingen ● 2420d

But I agree with this completely.It's morally and ethically indefensible how this country has been governed for decades and economically unsustainable.Perhaps this will be a turning point.

Ben Gemmingen ● 2420d

If you are referring to the 2008 credit crunch and its aftermath, this was a world-wide crisis. Giant companies - General Motors, Chrysler, AIG, Renault, Peugeot - had to be rescued, entire economies (Southern Europe, Ireland, the US itself) propped up.Britain was especially vulnerable for two reasons. The City was a cesspit of dodgy dealing (ask Javid, up to his neck in CDOs and derivatives at Deutsche Bank), and the Thatcher/Major mission to turn this country into an industrial desert had left the UK dangerously dependent on the finance sector.History will judge the response of Brown and Darling to have been exactly right – swift, bold and imaginative. They countered threatened economic collapse with hefty deficit spending. They were following the rule book of John Maynard Keynes, a Liberal and the cleverest man of the twentieth century, just discovered by Sunak. By 2010 the economy was reviving again, only to be hit by Osborne’s pointless, mean-spirited and economically illiterate Austerity trick. And now the vultures are coming home to roost.

Anthony Warwick-Ching ● 2419d

The government is working with private hospitals to increase capacity for what can only be called the worse virus for decades to hit the world. Private hospitals provide a contingency plan for such a dramatic and unforeseen virus. Regardless of how much more we pay in taxes the NHS could  not cope with such a dramatic and fast spread of such a fatal virus. Thank god we do have contingency.

Jayne Thorburn ● 2419d

Private hospitals have 8,000 beds compared to the NHS with 100,000. So although 8K is welcome it's not a game changer.(numbers come from a radio news bulletin. I haven't checked them)

Ken Munn ● 2419d