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NHS chiefs have denied claims that thousands of frail elderly people were denied life-saving care at the peak of the pandemic to prevent the health service from being overrun.
NHS England took the unusual step Sunday of issuing a 12-page rebuttal to allegations in the Sunday Times that patients deemed unlikely to survive were “canceled” by refusing intensive care.
Professor Stephen Powis, England’s NHS National Medical Director, said: ‘These false claims will be deeply offensive to NHS doctors, nurses, therapists and paramedics, who together have cared for more than 110,000 seriously ill hospitalized Covid-19 patients. during the first wave of the pandemic, as they continue to do today.
“The claims of the Sunday Times are simply not supported by the facts. It was older patients who received care from the NHS disproportionately. More than two-thirds of our hospitalized Covid-19 patients were over 65 years of age.
“The NHS repeatedly instructed staff that no patient who could benefit from treatment should be denied, and thanks to people who followed government guidelines, even at the height of the pandemic there was no shortage of ventilators and intensive care. ”He added.
The newspaper claimed that the high rate of coronavirus infection in the UK before the lockdown began on March 23 and the limited supply of NHS mechanical ventilators entering the pandemic meant that “the government, the NHS and many doctors they were forced to make controversial decisions: choosing which lives to save, which patients to treat, and whom to prioritize, to protect hospitals ”.
The Sunday Times said his claims were the result of a three-month investigation that involved speaking to more than 50 sources in the NHS and the government about the health service’s response to the pandemic.
As a result, they decided to prevent “a large number of elderly and frail patients” from entering the hospital in the first place, so that intensive care wards were not overwhelmed, which meant that many patients died of Covid-19 at home or in care. homes, he added. Ambulance and hospital teams were told to be more selective than usual about who should be admitted, “with specific instructions to exclude many older people,” the Sunday Times said.
But Dr. Alison Pittard, dean of the College of Intensive Care Medicine, said the patients had not been denied care. “During the first wave of Covid-19, the NHS did not run out of critical care capacity, which remained available to all who would benefit from it.”
The Sunday Times noted that of the excess of 59,000 deaths in England and Wales in the first six months of the pandemic, only 8,000 occurred in hospital, while 26,000 were in residences and 25,000 in private homes. He also claimed that an “age-based frailty score” commissioned by Professor Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, played a key role in the alleged policy of denying care.
However, a spokesperson for the Society for Intensive Care said that while a group of experts undertook work to develop guidance for clinicians on which patients should be prioritized for admission, “it was subsequently withdrawn on March 28/29. of 2020, with the Department of Health and Social Care Implementation or NHS, after a review of capacity and pandemic trajectory ”.
NHS sources insist that “NHS hospitals did not run out of intensive care beds, so there was never a need to refuse anyone’s treatment on the basis of NHS capacity. There was categorically no blanket national decision to deny care to any group of people, even based on their age. “
