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All non-urgent surgeries and appointments have been suspended in Greater Manchester as hospitals battle Covid-19 cases, it has been announced.
Cancer, urgent and specialized work will continue, but from Monday the routine and non-urgent work will begin to “pause”, reports the Manchester Evening News.
Letters will be sent to affected patients in the coming days. The Greater Manchester Health and Social Care Association said anyone not contacted should assume their appointment will go as planned.
People are asked not to call their GP or the hospital for information.
The surgery will continue at Rochdale Infirmary, which has been designated a “cold” or Covid-free site, as well as specialty hospitals like Christie.
Urgent care, such as cardiac services, vascular surgery, and transplantation, will continue, as will diagnostic services, including endoscopy.
Most outpatient services are also unaffected.
However, hospitals have made the decision to temporarily suspend work classified as non-urgent as a result of an increase in Covid admissions, which is not expected to stabilize for several weeks.
Both the Wigan and Stockport NHS trusts had already made that move in the past fortnight, as both had come under increasing pressure.
On Wednesday, the region’s health leader Sir Richard Leese indicated that such a move was likely to occur more broadly across the system in November, and the Manchester Foundation Trust is also pausing non-urgent operations.
Now it has emerged that all the hospital trusts had quietly agreed to the move this week.
An internal email sent to stakeholders by a trust, leaked to the MEN, revealed that they had all collectively agreed to pause routine and non-urgent care starting Monday, though not specialist or cancer work.
Routine elective reservations “will be canceled by November” and then reviewed, the email says, although GMHSCP said a deadline for suspensions had not yet been set.
Private hospitals continue to be used to try to relieve some tension on the NHS, including Beaumont in Bolton, which, like the Rochdale Infirmary, has been classified as a Covid-free site. NHS staff are working in some independent hospitals to keep some non-urgent jobs going.
However, the latest movement is a significant indicator of how much pressure the hospital system is currently under here, as well as the strain it is expected to experience in the coming weeks.
While Covid admissions had remained low during the summer months, despite high infection rates, they began to rise in the fall and a series of leaked projections in October showed that a large influx of patients was expected.
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