| Pedestrian |
Mar 29, 2020 8:45 PM |
We tend to be a North America-focused site, but let's move abroad for a minute:
Quote:
Britain’s Creaking National Health System Gears Up for Coronavirus Crisis
By Max Colchester and Alistair MacDonald
March 29, 2020 7:00 am ET
LONDON—A vast convention center in east London is being turned into a sprawling hospital that can handle up to 4,000 patients. Thousands of retired nurses and doctors are being drafted back to work. The British army is delivering protective clothing to dozens of hospitals around the country.
As the new coronavirus spreads here, Britain’s tightly funded National Health Service is taking drastic action to manage a crisis that some worry will overwhelm it.
. . . in disasters, the NHS has advantages: It is highly centralized and so can make wholesale changes to the way it operates. This means “the NHS is very good in a crisis,” said Nigel Edwards, chief executive of the Nuffield Trust, a health think tank. This allowed it to cancel thousands of operations to free up bed space. It is also preparing to marshal half-a-million volunteers to help deliver medicines to peoples’ homes and ferry the infirm to hospitals.
Furthermore, the provision of free health care should ensure people who are sick don’t continue work and spread the virus because they can’t afford treatment or worry about paying medical bills.
Going into the pandemic, U.K. hospital bed numbers had halved in three decades to 140,000, according to the King’s Fund, a health care charity.
More than 90% of hospital beds were occupied for all but four days of the 2017-18 winter, according to the British Medical Association, the doctors’ trade union . . . .
Since the NHS was founded in 1948, the average annual real increase in funding has been 3.6% a year, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. But between 2010 and 2018 the annual increase dropped to 1.3% as the government mended its finances following the financial crisis.
The U.K. had 2.1 acute hospital beds—those where a patient receives treatment for severe injuries or illnesses—for every 1,000 inhabitants. That is among the lowest among members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, according to 2017 data, and compares with 2.4 beds per 1,000 in the U.S. Other estimates, however, suggest that the numbers of beds capable of handling the most serious intensive-care cases are far higher stateside, and U.K. hospitals have just 8,000 ventilators—although the government says a further 8,000 will be acquired in coming weeks*.
Britain is still at a relatively early stage in the spread of coronavirus, with experts saying infections should peak in about three weeks, but preparation at the NHS hasn’t been smooth . . . . patients with nonemergency surgery appointments that their procedures had to be canceled, including many with cancer.
Nationwide, the NHS ordered the cancellation of operations to free up 33,000 beds. The NHS has already requisitioned private hospitals and is repurposing three vast convention centers to hold the sick, including the one in London that should open next week. In total the health service has added extra capacity equivalent to 50 hospitals, said NHS Chief Executive Simon Stevens on Friday, brushing off criticism that the British health service is underprepared compared to other countries.
The government’s medical advisers say that, with the country’s lockdown in place since March 23 the number of deaths related to the virus could be limited to 20,000. If so, the national system should cope—but hospitals in some areas could be overloaded.
Among the areas potentially at risk is the southwest of England. The region has the fewest critical-care beds in the country, and would need six times more beds, or an additional 1,900, to deal with a severe outbreak of coronavirus, according to medical-data firm Edge Health. Parts of the southwest also have the oldest population in the U.K., the demographic that has suffered most elsewhere . . . .
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/britain...d=hp_lead_pos8
*Compare this number of ventillators to the 30,000 ADDITIONAL ventillators Gov. Cuomo says NYC needs by itself |
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