After coronavirus, the NHS’s ability to provide care will be reduced, experts warn
A salutary indication of how things are going to change in the NHS for rural dwellers particularly methinks. This article tells us:
But living alongside Covid-19 for the foreseeable future will mean stark choices. Even if a second wave is prevented, resuming routine hospital, primary care and dental services with such an infectious virus still circulating is going to be all but impossible without a vaccine.
A major problem will be the challenges of infection control: swabbing, testing and isolating patients before surgery, creating time for changing PPE between patients, allowing additional time between operations or treatments to deep clean or allow air changes in operating theatres or dentists’ consultation rooms.
Even if a more rapid test can be developed, the impact on a system used to running with very little spare capacity will be formidable. Even before the crisis, the number of acute and intensive care beds per 1,000 population was lower than most OECD countries. There are also challenges of supplying and distributing PPE to the frontline.
The NHS has large numbers of older hospital buildings, with shared accommodation and narrow corridors. Many hospitals and GP surgeries do not have waiting areas that allow for social distancing, and A&E departments before the pandemic were significantly overcrowded. Even if these difficulties can be overcome, the NHS will need to make sure it has enough beds and ventilators for a possible second wave.
The staffing problems will be profound. Workers in high-risk categories may need to be removed from frontline duties, worsening longstanding staffing shortages. Staff who remain will have to make big changes to their day-to-day work, changing daily practices like ward rounds and creating time for testing and PPE.
The combined effect: a reduction in the NHS’s ability to provide care. Waiting lists will lengthen, non-urgent procedures will be deprioritised, and patients will find it harder to get routine appointments. The big question facing politicians is how far the public will be prepared to accept such limitations on an NHS they have already sacrificed so much to protect.