Health chiefs are battling a Covid-19 outbreak at Greater Manchester hospital where 18 people died from the virus in a week.
In recent weeks, Tameside and Glossop NHS trust has seen a rise in mortality rates as more older people become seriously ill.
There were 18 confirmed deaths at Tameside General Hospital from Covid-19 in the week to September 10. That accounted for a third of all deaths in England.
Of those, five people died at the hospital in one day on September 7.
It is unclear how many of the people who died caught the virus while already being treated at the facility for other conditions.
Brendan Ryan, the trust’s medical director, revealed the outbreak of coronavirus cases had been mostly caused by people coming into the hospital through emergency admissions.
He denied there had been an ‘excess of deaths’ at the hospital, insisting the numbers were within the ‘normal pattern' of patient death.
After the outbreak was flagged to Public Health England, Tameside Hospital was inspected by the regional infection prevention team over the weekend of September 5 to 6.
Speaking at a health and wellbeing meeting on Thursday, Mr Ryan said the prevention team were ‘pleased and supportive’ of the arrangements in place at the hospital.
But he added that the outbreak was still ongoing.
“We are managing an outbreak, it’s still classified as open although the peak seems to have passed,” Mr Ryan said.
“It’s mostly relating to our emergency admissions where it’s becoming part of a feature of the health of the population over the last few weeks, particularly for those people who have complex previous conditions.
“There has been a rise in community cases of Covid over the last few weeks and as we are almost a thermometer for what’s happening in the community we have seen that in the hospital also.
“Although it’s talked about that a lot of the increased number of cases are in younger people, at the hospital we are mostly treating older folk or people with complex medical histories or a combination of those things.
“Indeed we’ve had some deaths of patients who have had Covid as part of their spectrum of illness, it may not have been their only illness and it may not have even been the worst illness that they’ve had.”
The numbers of new coronavirus cases are currently spiking again in the borough, and the infection rate has hit 105.1 cases per 100,000 people for the week to September 16.
Mr Ryan told the committee members it appeared that coronavirus was featuring as part of the ‘illness load’ of the population of the area, which was also making its way in to the hospital.
However he urged people with conditions that need medial attention not to avoid getting treatment in hospital.
“For planned surgery we have green areas in the hospital where only people who have tested negative go, who are treated by staff who are routinely tested and can only work if they continue to test negative,” Mr Ryan added.
“We know that folk are worried about being treated in the current climate but we are working really hard to make the treatment as high quality and as safe a process that can make people feel confident as we can.
“It would be inappropriate to say you can banish it because we don’t know enough about the disease yet to be that confident but you can reduce the risk.”
Alongside the hospital outbreak, there have also been outbreaks in Tameside’s care homes – and bosses say they are currently managing ‘six or seven’.
Assistant director of population health, Debbie Watson explained that care home staff are tested every seven days, and residents every 28 days.
“But where we’re seeing more than two cases in a home we are having an outbreak control meeting and then doing whole home testing as well,” she added.
An outbreak is classed as two or more linked positive tests or deaths in a particular setting.
Director of adult services, Stephanie Butterworth added: “We are managing some outbreaks in care homes.
“They are quite low numbers except for one of the care homes we’ve got we’re into double figures.
“About three quarters of the positive tests that are coming back are staff. These are staff members who are testing positive which links I think to the high level of community transmission.
“As it stands to date, people haven’t been poorly. Any resident in a care home that’s come back positive around this testing has been asymptomatic so we’re not seeing huge numbers of poorly people at this point.
“But obviously winter is coming, we have got a frail elderly population in Tameside so it’s something we are trying to keep an eye on.”
