‘We can expand in the PEH site’
GUERNSEY’S focus is on using the Princess Elizabeth Hospital to cope with Covid-19 rather than have a temporary facility like in Jersey.
A £14m. 180-bed Nightingale hospital is currently being built in Jersey to cope with the coronavirus outbreak.
States medical director Dr Peter Rabey said such a facility was not thought necessary at present but they were staying prepared.
Currently eight patients with the virus are in the Covid-19 ward at the PEH.
‘We can be overwhelmed,’ he said. ‘Any health system in this crisis could be overwhelmed, so we’ve been doing the planning.’
He said they had been doing detailed modelling about what might happen.
However, he said they were focusing on keeping patients on the Princess Elizabeth Hospital site and they could expand an area with 24 beds up to 70 beds, if needed.
That way staff already at the hospital could help with those extra beds.
‘We can expand quite significantly in the PEH site,’ he said.
‘That’s really important to us, because we have staff there, we’ve got oxygen there and the things we need, and that will be our first port of call.’
He said they were looking how to expand beyond that, if needed, but did not give details.
‘I really hope it doesn’t come to that,’ he said.
Health & Social Care president Deputy Soulsby said creating a Nightingale hospital could be challenging.
‘I think the biggest challenge of having an overflow hospital... it’s all very well having extra beds, but you’ve got to man them,’ she said.
‘And that will always be the bigger challenge, I think. You can pay lots of money for lots of beds, but if you haven’t got people to look after patients, that is a problem.’
Dr Rabey was glad that his report of the day about the hospital was anti-climatic and overall everything was under control.
All the patients in the Covid-19 ward are doing well and none of them are in the intensive care unit.
‘We’ve had another delivery of four ventilators, which is really good,’ Dr Rabey said.
‘We are trying to get more.’
He said they had the preparations in place, but he hoped they would not need it.
The States has been trying to get more personal protective equipment and Dr Rabey said they would like more.
‘But we’ve got enough to be going on with,’ he said.
‘We are hoping for another delivery of surgical masks today and I really hope that arrives.
‘Surgical masks are the thing we are most living hand-to-mouth on really. But we have supplies in. We are managing them really tightly.’
He said they had hundreds of thousands of pieces of kits ordered, which they were tracking. ‘We are part of the NHS supply lines, so we are included in deliveries for them,’ he said.
‘So we’ve got fingers in every pie. We’ve had offers of help from on-island, which we followed up actively.’
He said they were looking at ways to safely sterilise masks for re-use, but they did not wish to get to that point as people should have a new mask when they needed it.
‘We have those contingency plans in place,’ he said. ‘We just hope we never need to draw on them.’
Chief minister Gavin St Pier said the States did have weekly dialogue with the Ministry of Justice and the other Crown Dependencies, to share experiences.
