Greater Manchester’s general hospital beds are now close to full, the M.E.N. understands, helping prompt its decision last night to pause non-urgent surgery almost across the board.
Sources report a very sharp spike in admissions over recent days, with some describing a more than doubling of Covid-related demand in a very short space of time in certain places, although intensive care capacity has remained comparatively flat.
Nearly one in four patients outside of ICU have Covid, with 96pc of beds occupied. Normally hospitals aim for no more than around 85pc.
It comes as the region last night announced all non-urgent surgery would be paused at every hospital in the conurbation apart from Rochdale, which has been designated a ‘green’ site, along with continued specialist work at the Christie.
Everywhere else will limit care to Covid patients and emergency care and surgery, including cancer, cardiac, vascular and transplant operations. The majority of outpatient work will continue.
The system described it as a ‘temporary measure’ brought in ‘due to the rising impact of Covid’,
It comes as one senior figure described the rise in admissions since Christmas as ‘really quite scary’, while a second said they had ‘shot up very quickly’, with new figures due to be released this afternoon.
At the same time the system is battling rising levels of staff absence, both in the NHS - where absence was already running at 10pc before Christmas - and in social care, with infection rates above the national average and in some parts of the conurbation running at well over 2,000 cases per 100,000 people.
More than one senior NHS source also said ‘incidental’ cases of Covid in hospitals, those discovered once patients had been admitted for something else, had become a particular issue as a result and had been driving ward closures.
“We have been moving wards around and plugging staffing gaps, so things are very difficult, with Covid numbers roughly trebling,” said one.
Meanwhile the discharge of patients has been constrained by staffing shortages in social care, which was already suffering with a severely depleted workforce before the omicron wave hit.
The latest occupancy figure of 96pc is far beyond the NHS’s usual level of between 80pc and 90pc and means NHS leaders have had to seek ways of freeing up more space, by scaling back less urgent work.
Hospitals in Lancashire had already sounded the alarm in recent days about the scale of the Covid pressure there, with hospitals in both Blackpool and Morecambe declaring critical incidents as a result.
Andy Burnham is due to give an update on the Covid situation here at 2pm.
