Covid inquiry told Treasury blocked request for 10,000 NHS beds

Boris Johnson’s government has blocked a request to finance 10,000 other hospital beds at the height of the cocvid pandemic, said NHS England Director.

Amanda Pritchard told the British investigation Covid-19, the decision, made by the Treasury in July 2020, had been “very disappointing”.

Additional beds and staff would have been used to cut the waiting lists for planned care and “build resilience” in a second winter wave in the pandemic, she said.

The government said he could not comment while the investigation is underway.

The Ministers of Health from the time should testify later this month, in the third section of the survey, examining the impact of Covid on the NHS and health care systems across the United Kingdom.

Ms. Pritchard was head of NHS exploitation in England from 2019 until she was promoted to director general in August 2021.

In her testimony, she declared that a request had been made to the government, for 10,000 additional and personal hospital beds, in July 2020.

The demand was based on the modeling of the propagation of the virus, as well as the need to cope with other pressures which to come and resume more planned or optional, surgical and other treatments for non -comfortable patients.

But the investigation heard that the Prime Minister’s private treasure and private office had refused the request, saying that they wanted more use of temporary Nightingale hospitals with the private sector.

And Ms. Prichard had been informed that the decision would be examined again in the context of a wider expenses expected in the fall of 2021.

She described the decision as “very disappointing”, saying that the waiting lists for the planned NHS processing in England would be in “a fairly different position” today if the additional funding had been agreed.

“If we had had this capacity, we could certainly have been able to treat thousands of other patients … while being more resilient in the second wave of the pandemic and in winter more generally,” said Prhard.

In the summer of 2020, the NHS in England had total permanent bed capacity to treat around 95,000 patients in acute hospitals.

This was increased by 4,000 others from winter 2023, as part of a recovery plan agreed by the Prime Minister of the Rishi Sunak time.

Later in her testimony, Ms. Pritchard said that the health service had faced a period of “extreme pressure” in the winter of 2020-2021, while another wave of covid has spread across the country.

At this stage, new treatments had been discovered, including cheap steroid dexamethasone, and the first hairstyle vaccines began to be deployed in small numbers.

But the level of community transmission at the time meant that certain intensive care units were always pushed “by the edge” and were “just on the edge” to run out of bed space.

At the national level, the health service had never had to “systematically limit” access to treatments because hospitals could not face the demand, said Ms. Pritchard.

“This does not mean, however, that he did not feel completely crushing for the staff at that time in these places-and that does not mean that the type of care that was provided was something normal,” she added.

Ms. Pritchard was also interviewed about the seven temporary Hightingale hospitals built quickly, in March and April 2020, through England to treat the patients.

The data observed by the survey show that the total cost for the taxpayer, including configuration and downgrading, is now estimated at 358.5 million pounds.

Hospitals – in Birmingham, Bristol, Exeter, Harrogate, London, Manchester and Sunderland – treated 141 patients in the first wave of the virus and 1097 patients and other patients in the second wave.

In total, 50.4 million pounds sterling were spent on a site, Birmingham, which has never been used by patients in pandemic.

The Bristol site also carried out 6,554 assessments for the patients of the hospital for the city’s eyes.

Ms. Pritchard told the investigation that the program had always been “useful” because the sites had been envisaged as “military hospitals” at the time.

“We thought we did to avoid a situation in northern Italy,” she said, referring to Lombardy scenes, where intensive care units had been exceeded.