'It's safer to go to hospital than stay at home having a heart attack': Blackpool Victoria's medical director moves to reassure patients after saying 100 may have caught coronavirus in hospital - with some left on wards with Covid patients

Around 100 people are feared to have caught coronavirus in hospitals on the Fylde coast – but they remain the safest place to be for those who need emergency care, a top doctor said.
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Dr Jim Gardner, medical director at Blackpool Victoria Hospital and the Clifton Hospital in St Annes, said a lack of testing in the early days of the Covid outbreak meant patients with the disease were put on wards with those who did not have it.

However, of more than 16,000 people admitted to hospital in the last three months, just 0.06 per cent are thought to have picked up the virus.

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He said: “There is no doubt some people have caught Covid in hospital," with one confirmed case in the past fortnight.

A patient arriving at Blackpool Victoria Hospital during the coronavirus pandemic (Picture: Dan Martino for JPIMedia)A patient arriving at Blackpool Victoria Hospital during the coronavirus pandemic (Picture: Dan Martino for JPIMedia)
A patient arriving at Blackpool Victoria Hospital during the coronavirus pandemic (Picture: Dan Martino for JPIMedia)

But, following a rise in deaths of people who stayed at home with deadly conditions because they wanted to avoid going into hospital, he declared: “Unequivocally, the most dangerous thing is to stay at home if something bad is happening to you pathologically, and through the course of the last 12 weeks, we have seen some really sad cases where patients have presented late in their illness and had a bad outcome as a consequence.

“We have seen examples through our heart clinics and our stroke units in particular”, though Dr Gardner said it was not immediately possible to say just how many have died.

There are just seven patients with Covid in hospital now, Dr Gardner said, down from around 150 at the height of the first wave, reducing the risk of contagion, and he said bosses have “got frankly much better protection in place for all of our staff”.

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That wasn’t possible three months ago “because we didn’t have the stock”, he said, adding: “We have definitely learned lessons over the last 12 weeks and have progressively put more and more procedures in place to protect our staff and patients to the best of our ability.

“We had preparations for flu and we had stocks of PPE [personal protective equipment] but not in the quantities and for the duration that it has turned out to be needed.

“We do have an isolation ward but that ward has eight beds on it, not 150, which is what we needed at the peak of the Covid surge.”

There have been several accounts of people apparently catching Covid-19 while in hospital, including from Carleton pensioner Jean Strawford, 72. The former showbiz talent manager, who worked alongside the late resort entertainer Joe Longthorne, is feared to have picked up the virus at Clifton Hospital.

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“It was excruciating; truly horrible,” she said of fighting the infection.

“At the height of the fever I was having the worst illusions. and sending goodbye messages to my son and sister. I was completely out of myself. It was as if something had taken over my entire body and I couldn’t do anything.”

At least two other accounts have surfaced online, including in a Blackpool Covid support group on Facebook.

When asked if it was possible to say how many patients caught Covid at either Clifton or the Vic, Dr Gardner said: “Because of the difficulties around the way the swabs work, and because of our uncertainties around the incubation period, then the answer is guarded, but I would say it could be – it could be – as high as 100,” with an estimated 20 at Clifton and 80 at the Vic.

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But, to put that figure into context, there have been 16,469 local hospital admissions in the past three months.

It means a chunk of Blackpool’s 681 confirmed coronavirus cases may not have been contracted in the community, though a lack of widespread testing until relatively recently means the true number of cases in the resort may have been much higher.

Dr Gardner described Covid as a “very, very transmissible disease,” and described people “coming in in large numbers and having to be processed through the hospital and placed into wards all across the hospital”, while he said “a lot of procedures go on where aerosols are generated”.

He said: “At the height of the crisis, the only place in society where hundreds or thousands of people were gathering was hospitals.

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“It wasn’t happening anywhere else. With the best will in the world, and with the best procedures in the world, the chance of some transmission exists.

“As we were going, we were doing our best to progressively put things in place, but sometimes patients would come in who didn’t look like they had Covid.

"Maybe they’d come in with some different set of symptoms – and a few days down the line would turn out to have Covid.

“Right at the beginning we couldn’t swab everyone immediately and get a quick turnaround, so we would be waiting for a couple of days to get the test result back.”

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Dr Gardner said wards are split into red, housing “clearly Covid-positive” patients; green, where medics “would believe” patients were “Covid negative”; and amber, where “clinically it looked quite possible but actually the swab was not confirming the clinical signs.”

And he accepted: “There have been patients who have been in green wards who then, surprisingly, when swabbed, really either just as a checking procedure, [tested positive].

“Now, for example, we will swab everyone. Everyone who comes into hospital now is swabbed on day one. But we are also now re-swabbing between day five and seven to check again.

Someone might come in with a heart attack or chest pains, and it looks like it’s nothing to do with Covid and they could have a swab which is negative. But then five or six days down the line, they could have a swab which is positive...”

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That doesn’t mean they caught coronavirus in hospital, Dr Gardner said, but some patients have been swabbed after a stay of 14 days “so could only have got it in hospital”.

Dr Gardner, who has been in the job since January, said: “If everyone walked around in full PPE all the time, the problem is there are certain things you can’t do, and there are other infections that spread in a different way.

“If you wear full PPE all the time and therefore you double-glove, you can’t then be doing the proper hand washing and so on, which is so important when it comes to some other infectious diseases. There’s a balance to be struck.

“Could you ever make somewhere 100 per cent safe? You probably could, if you didn’t do anything. What we can do really is do the best we can to take sensible precautions to allow people to move around the hospital, to come and go, while protecting themselves as best as possible.

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“We have moved to doing a lot of work remotely, so we are doing loads more video consultations and ringing patients up and connecting with them in different ways to try and minimise the risk of interaction with hospital services.

“And when patients come in, we have got everyone in levels of PPE and we have zoned the hospital. We are swabbing a lot more than we did before, including swabbing our own staff, to try and make sure it’s as safe as it can be.”

Dr Gardner said he thinks the protective measures are working, and cited antibody test results, which show fewer hospital workers have had the virus on the Fylde coast than in London.

He said: “We have done over 4,000 tests for our own staff and we have done loads of tests for other trusts and so on. Our positive rate is 18 per cent.

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“When we ask colleagues across the north west, that’s the same, pretty much, and I gather at similar trusts in London it’s 23 per cent.”

The Vic, where visiting is restricted, with all visitors obliged to wear a face covering, also has one of the lowest death rates for patients admitted to hospital in the north west, figures showed.

But Dr Gardner said he wanted to say sorry to the families left heartbroken and bereaved by the pandemic.

He said: “If there was any sense of how I would feel about the fact we might have caused harm to some patients, it would be to be unequivocally sorry about that.

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“Our ambition is to provide the best care we possibly can for people, and it’s a complicated business and sometimes things don’t go perfectly.

“But I do believe we are learning the lessons all the time, and we are striving to make the system as safe as it can possibly be. I really think, if people feel poorly and they need health care, then they should feel confident that they can come and see us.”

Government ministers have stated that local lockdowns could be used to crush any sign of a second wave flare up.

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