>> I also thin there are serious human rights issues with compulsory medication with Convention Rights infringed.
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Screw their rights. Make vaccination compulsory.
Doctors and nurses vent anger as unvaccinated Covid cases delay vital operations
Shaun Lintern
Saturday December 04 2021, 6.00pm GMT, The Sunday Times
The NHS has a backlog of 5.8 million waiting for surgery and specialists are increasingly frustrated at how the unjabbed have left them unable to tackle it
While the success of the vaccination rollout has reduced the overall impact of Covid-19 on hospitals, intensive care clinicians from across England have spoken out over the continuing pressure they are under
Doctors and nurses have told of their anger and frustration at not being able to treat seriously ill patients as new figures show that more than 90 per cent of Covid sufferers requiring the most specialist care are unvaccinated.
While the success of the vaccination rollout has reduced the overall impact of Covid-19 on hospitals, intensive care clinicians from across England have spoken out over the continuing pressure they are under.
Between 20 per cent and 30 per cent of critical care beds in England are occupied by Covid patients and three quarters of those have not been vaccinated, according to the latest data up to July this year.
Separately, NHS England said that between July and November more than nine in 10 patients receiving the most specialist care, in which artificial lungs were used to try to save their lives, were unvaccinated.
This is undermining efforts to reduce the backlog of surgeries and the overall NHS waiting list, which had grown to 5.8 million people by the end of September.
Doctors have warned that some transplant operations cannot go ahead and that complex cancer surgeries are being delayed, risking tumours becoming inoperable.
Nicki Credland, chairman of the British Association of Critical Care Nurses, said: “All nurses understand they have to provide non-judgmental care. But what we find difficult is that giving care to patients who have chosen not to be vaccinated has a knock-on effect on other patients. We are still human beings and we still get angry at things that we think aren’t just.
“It does take a toll on nurses and I am also hearing from nurses up and down the country about some patients who are being rude, disrespectful and even violent to some nurses trying to look after them.”
She said this was behind high levels of mental health problems in ICU nurses, who are already reporting increased levels of post-traumatic stress after their experiences of the past two years.
Dr Dhruv Parekh, a consultant in critical care at the University Hospitals Birmingham trust, which has Europe’s largest critical care unit with 100 intensive care beds across a whole floor of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, said: “When you can’t provide the services you feel you need to for the rest of your community and other patients who’ve got life-limiting illnesses, there is a degree of frustration and anger. This is stopping us from doing that really important work and helping the rest of the patients we need to be trying to help.”
The 43-year-old said that it was “infuriating and frustrating” to see patients die when their deaths could have been prevented. “It’s heartbreaking and upsetting because ultimately, when that happens, for the patient and the family, the realisation this potentially could have been prevented dawns.
Dr Dhruv Parekh said that Covid patients had a significantly longer length of stay in critical care than other patients
“It’s painful to see that happen and painful to see families go through the anguish and also the guilt that they will feel. It’s something that we will all carry psychologically for years and years to come.”
Parekh said that Covid patients had a significantly longer length of stay in critical care than other patients, with an average of nine days; longer if they survived the infection. In his unit he said this meant that as many as 100 to 140 other surgeries, which would require stays of only one or two days, had to be delayed each week.
“These are transplants that can’t go ahead. These are patients waiting for complex cancer surgery where every week counts. It could tip them over from an operable cancer to an inoperable cancer,” he said.
Between July and November, NHS England said that 150 patients were referred for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or Ecmo, where blood is cycled through an artificial lung machine before returning it to the body. Of these patients, only 6 per cent had been fully vaccinated.
The treatment is usually reserved for younger patients and is a last-ditch effort to buy their bodies time to recover from the virus.
In total 46.5 million people in the UK have had two doses of Covid-19 vaccine, equivalent to 80 per cent of the population. Almost 20 million have had a third dose, or a booster, just over a third of the population.
Ministers have pledged to ramp up the booster programme owing to the threat of the Omicron variant, with all eligible adults offered a booster by the end of January.
The proportion of unvaccinated patients varies between hospitals around the country. In the West Midlands, leaked NHS data shows that out of 17 ICUs that submitted data to NHS England, 11 had more unvaccinated than vaccinated patients in ICU with Covid, although the numbers will be small.
Three hospitals reported that all the patients in ICU with Covid were unvaccinated: the Royal Derby, Kettering General and the Pilgrim Hospital, Boston, Lincolnshire.
Dr Steve Mathieu, from the UK’s Intensive Care Society and a consultant in critical care, said: “One in two Covid-19 patients who require ICU and ventilatory support will die. This is a really important message because we know the vaccines work and there are very few diseases that carry such a high mortality rate.”
He said that staff in ICUs across the country were emotionally drained. “We are used to being busy, but at the moment we’re dealing with a disease that actually is preventable and seeing patients die that shouldn’t is really awful for all of us.”
He urged people who had yet to get vaccinated to do so, saying: “This is not just about yourself, this is about your family, this is about other people. These are decisions that can be made that will affect the ability for someone else to have life-changing treatment.”
Dr Charlotte Summers, professor of intensive care medicine at the University of Cambridge, said: “What we often forget in our emotional reactions is that there’s a structural problem within the NHS. We went into the pandemic with less critical care beds per head of population than almost anywhere in Europe. So we had less resources to start with and then we have had a series of policy decisions made in the UK that are allowing high levels of viral transmission, both of which are combining to put stress on the NHS. None of that is the fault of patients ending up in our ICUs.”
She said that the impact of bed pressures on ICU departments in the NHS and the subsequent cancellations for other patients had a “huge impact” on nurses and doctors.
But she added that there was an issue of trust between some communities and some in positions of authority during the pandemic that had undermined public health messaging on vaccination.
Last edited by: VxFan on Fri 10 Dec 21 at 02:49
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