A lack of capacity in intensive care units during the Covid pandemic was a “political choice”, Professor Sir Chris Whitty has said.
Speaking at the Covid Inquiry in central London, the Government’s chief medical officer said that the UK had gone into the pandemic with a “very low” number of beds compared with other wealthy countries.
Prof Whitty was giving evidence to Module 3 of the Inquiry, which is examining how the NHS was impacted by the virus.
He said: “Taking ICU [intensive care units], in particular, the UK has a very low ICU capacity compared to most of our peer nations in high income countries. Now that’s a choice, that’s a political choice. It’s a system configuration choice, but it is a choice. Therefore you have less reserve when a major emergency happens, even if it’s short of something of the scale of Covid.”
Prof Whitty added that a lack of staffing capacity made it more difficult for health leaders to scale up intensive care units.
“You can buy beds, you can buy space, you can even put in oxygen. And I think we learned some lessons from, for example, trying to set up the Nightingale hospitals, about the difficulties of doing that,” he said.
“But fundamentally, the limit to that system, as to any system, is trained people and there is no way you can train someone in six weeks to have the experience of an experienced ICU nurse or an experienced ICU doctor. It is simply not possible.”
He also told how the pandemic was “incredibly harrowing” for NHS staff, “particularly in the first wave before vaccines became available”.
Earlier on Thursday, the Inquiry heard harrowing evidence on the impact of Covid on hospitals from a senior medic.
Professor Kevin Fong – former national clinical adviser in emergency preparedness, resilience and response at NHS England - held back tears as he described scenes “from hell” on intensive care wards.
“I worked on a shift where we had six deaths in a single shift. Another hospital told us that they had 10 deaths on a shift, two of whom were their own staff,” he said.
“We had nurses talking about patients raining from the sky, where one of the nurses told me they just got tired of putting people in body bags.”
