‘Significant’ number of staff off work with Covid
SIGNIFICANT numbers of staff at the Princess Elizabeth Hospital are off work with Covid-19, but hospitalisations from the virus remain low.
Yesterday there were five patients in the hospital with Covid, and four of them were in intensive care.
There is also a turnover of Covid patients because there have been two discharges and two admissions in one day.
Dr Peter Rabey, the medical director, said that staffing was under strain. ‘We’ve seen significant numbers of staff getting Covid and currently being off work, particularly affected has been our intensive care team, nursing staff and the emergency department.
‘So it’s frontline services and we’re grateful to other staff who have been working over and above to assist in those areas.'
There was also a plea from Dr Rabey for people to get their primary vaccinations and booster injections following local data showing that 40% of Covid-19 patients over the last three months have been unvaccinated.
‘That small group of adults who haven’t had vaccinations are producing nearly half of our admissions with Covid.
‘And when we look at who has been the most sick, the ones that have needed to go into high dependency and intensive care, nearly two-thirds of those who’ve needed that higher level of treatment have not been vaccinated.’
The five people in the PEH yesterday represented 0.2% of total cases, reinforcing early evidence that Omicron is a milder variant.
At this stage there are no restrictions on visiting patients, but that is being kept under review and visitors are being asked to do lateral flow tests beforehand.
Urgent operations and cancer operations are still being carried out, but there has been further cancellations of non-urgent surgery.
Dr Rabey said that unfortunately the numbers on waiting lists were increasing.
‘We understand how upsetting it is for patients to get their operations cancelled, especially close to, or on the day of surgery and we have every sympathy with the people affected by that.
‘But we have had to do this, and we constantly have to keep staffing levels under review.
‘We’re very sorry that we haven’t been able to do all the joint replacements, for example, today that we had hoped to do.’
