Blackpool hospital chief warns of mounting Covid pressures

Kevin McGee, chief executive of Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, warned of a “very difficult” time as community transmission of Covid was seeing “significant increases of 40 or 50 per cent in some of our areas.”

But he told a virtual meeting of the trust’s board of directors the NHS would get through it with a combination of lockdown measures and vaccination.

Up until Thursday this week, the hospital had carried out 4,000 vaccinations including 1,000 NHS staff.

Mr McGee called on the community to play its part in protecting the NHS by adhering to lockdown measures, but he also said many routine treatments would have to be delayed.

He told the meeting: “I am genuinely concerned about the next three or four weeks in terms of capacity of the NHS across Lancashire and in Blackpool.

“The staff are working under extraordinary pressure at this moment in time.

“Our Covid numbers are increasing now on a day by day basis.

“Our critical care capacity is extremely stretched, and when we look at that increase in community prevalence that we can see over the next few weeks, that will translate into enormous pressure on our acute services.”

The number of critical care beds has been increased from the usual 16 to 24, and could go up to as many as 32 if necessary, but that means diverting staff from other wards.

Mr McGee said: “We will have to stand down some of our routine elective work and some of our out-patient work, as a consequence of keeping our services and our communities safe.

“There will be compromises that need to be made in the next few weeks and it will be very difficult.

“But based on the extraordinary efforts of our staff up until this point, I am also confident we will get through.

“We need all our communities to play their part in this. We’re now into national lockdown, and it’s vital we reduce community transmission as that will ultimately see a reduction in demand and flow into our hospital.”

He added the vaccination programme would also ease pressure, with a vaccination hub already in place at Blackpool Victoria Hospital and the Winter Gardens vaccination hub due to open later in January.

Hopefully this will reduce pressure by late February and into March and the spring.

Of the 4,000 vaccinations carried out by the hospital up until Thursday; 2,000 were people aged over 80; 1,000 were care home workers and 1,000 were NHS staff.

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