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A senior NHS figure has cast doubt on the service’s ambition to continue treating all patients for other illnesses during the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic.
Professor Stephen Powis, England’s NHS National Medical Director, told Sky News that the National Health Service “was not running out of capacity” and could “treat all the people it needed to treat”, but that local decisions about treatment should be taken if the situation changed.
His comments come as the Northwest Ambulance Service was forced to declare a major incident and ask people to only call them with life-threatening concerns.
The NHS was told to stop all non-urgent operations in April this year to build capacity to deal with the first wave of infections. Professor Powis said that this time all treatments must continue uninterrupted.
“There are two key differences this time. First, we keep elective care running all the time. We didn’t do that in April because the virus was hitting us very quickly and we needed to build capacity.
“This winter we intend to keep it up and of course we are heading into winter rather than out of winter. So in addition to covid, we will see all the other infections that we get during winter.”
The decision, said Professor Powis, to pause elective care would be made by the Trusts at the local level.
“In those areas of the country where infection rates are highest, there is clearly the most pressure on NHS beds. And unfortunately, some trusts have had to make short-term decisions to forgo some elective care.
Professor Stephen Powis Says Local Trusts May Decide To Pause Elective Care
“Of course we have a lot more information at the local level due to testing, so NHS organizations can do much better and help each other,” he said.
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Nicki Credland, president of the British Association of Intensive Care Nurses, believes that the ambition to keep all elective care through the fall in the face of rising infections is unrealistic and more Trusts will be forced to cancel non-urgent operations.
She said: “Keeping elective work for the NHS is really important in terms of the health of the nation.
“No one, no nurse, no doctor within the NHS would want patients to suffer because they cannot access the NHS for routine treatment.
“However, we have to understand that the NHS is not an infinite resource, we have a set number of staff that we can work with. And those staff have to handle a massively increasing volume of patients.”
“Certainly in the north of England right now they are seeing high volumes of admissions.
“It’s just not possible for those personnel to be in two places at the same time.
“So to protect the safety of patients and protect the safety of our staff, we have no choice but to think about how we can remove the workload in one area to redirect it and handle the growing need in the other.
“And the way we can do that is by cutting back on elective surgeries.”
