NHS maternity wards are at a “breaking point”, a health chief has warned, as a new wave of Covid cases puts immense pressure on the available resources.
Dr Edward Morris, the president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, is the latest high-ranking clinician to sound alarm bells about increasing pressures on the health service as Covid cases rise.
Dr Morris, the UK’s most senior gynaecologist, has said he was increasingly concerned at suggestions that the sharp rise in new cases reported in recent weeks is now having a flow-on effect to the numbers of Covid cases being admitted into hospital.
The average daily Covid hospital admissions in England are at their highest level for nearly eight month, while hospitals continue to deal with a backlog of 5.7 million patients caused by the first and second waves of the virus.
According to reports from the Guardian, latest data shows 39,962 people reported testing positive for Covid on Sunday.
Some 328,287 tested positive in the last 7 days prior to this, with 949 deaths during the same period.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak has today ruled out “immediately” moving to the Government’s coronavirus plan B, a suite of measures such as working from home, and compulsory face masks in some settings.
He told BBC One's The Andrew Marr Show: "Well, the Prime Minister actually just said that we're looking at the data all the time, as you would expect us to.
"We're monitoring everything, but at the moment the data does not suggest that we should be immediately moving to Plan B, but of course we will keep an eye on that and the plans are ready."
Vaccines minister Maggie Throup said Plan A is "working" and "where we need to be".
But Dr Morris said the latest wave of Covid infections also threatened to derail efforts to tackle a huge backlog in cases of women on waitlists for gynaecological treatment.
Operations were already being cancelled in some parts of the country, senior doctors have said.
Dr Morris has also raised fears that patient safety could be put at risk in maternity wards if the specialist staff are redeployed to other parts of the hospital as a result of increased Covid cases.
“The Covid-19 pandemic is far from over and we’re becoming increasingly concerned about the immense pressures facing our maternity staff this winter if the situation continues as it is,” he said.
With the number of Covid cases rising once more, the NHS could soon be in a situation where it is unable to deliver the care needed to deal with the already built-up backlog.
Dr Morris urged unvaccinated pregnant women to urgently get jabbed, following recent figures showing a fifth of the most critically ill coronavirus patients in England were unvaccinated pregnant women.
It comes after Boris Johnson has been warned to implement Covid "Plan B plus" for the winter or risk an NHS crisis.
NHS Confederation boss Matthew Taylor, which represents the healthcare systems in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, said the new curbs were needed or the UK would "risk stumbling into a winter crisis".
The government has warned that working from home and vaccine passports could be introduced if the NHS is at risk of being overwhelmed.
But Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng ruled out imposing another lockdown - and even told Brits to go ahead with planning Christmas parties.
Mr Taylor said action needs to brought in now or it will derail efforts to tackle the backlog of five million patients waiting for treatment.
He said: "We are right on the edge – and it is the middle of October. It would require an incredible amount of luck for us not to find ourselves in the midst of a profound crisis over the next three months.”
Meanwhile, Dr Katherine Henderson, the president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, has today warned that emergency departments are in a “terrible place”.
Speaking to Sky News’s Trevor Phillips on Sunday, she said: “We’re already struggling to cope. This is not something that’s coming in the next couple of months.
“We’re already in a terrible place where we have got large queues of ambulances with vulnerable people waiting in those ambulances to be offloaded into departments and other patients at home waiting to be picked up by the ambulance.
“That’s the thing that really worries me; that these are patients who have not yet received treatment that we don’t necessarily know what’s wrong with them that we’re really struggling to get into our healthcare facilities to then work out what we need to do.”
