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

Boris Johnson’s authorities blocked a request to fund one other 10,000 hospital beds on the peak of the Covid pandemic, the chief govt of NHS England has mentioned.

Amanda Pritchard instructed the UK Covid-19 Inquiry the choice, made by the Treasury in July 2020, had been “very disappointing”.

Further beds and employees would have been used to chop ready lists for deliberate care and “construct resilience” going right into a second winter wave of the pandemic, she mentioned.

The federal government has mentioned it can not remark whereas the inquiry is in progress.

Well being ministers from the time are anticipated to offer proof later this month, to the third part of the inquiry, taking a look at Covid’s influence on the NHS and healthcare programs throughout the UK.

Ms Pritchard served as NHS England’s chief working officer from 2019 till she was promoted to chief govt, in August 2021.

In her proof, she mentioned a request had been made to the federal government, for 10,000 further everlasting, staffed hospital beds, in July 2020.

The demand had been based mostly on modelling the unfold of the virus, together with the necessity to take care of different pressures that coming winter and resume extra deliberate, or elective, surgical procedure and different remedies for non-Covid sufferers.

However the inquiry heard the Treasury and the prime minister’s non-public workplace had refused the request, saying they needed extra use fabricated from momentary Nightingale hospitals together with the non-public sector.

And Ms Prichard had been instructed the choice can be checked out once more as a part of a wider spending evaluate anticipated within the autumn of 2021.

She known as the choice “very disappointing”, saying ready lists for deliberate NHS therapy in England can be in “fairly a special place” at this time had the additional funding been agreed.

“If we had had that capability, we might actually have handled 1000’s extra sufferers… in addition to being extra resilient going into the second wave of the pandemic and into winter extra usually,” Ms Prichard mentioned.

In the summertime of 2020, the NHS in England had a complete everlasting mattress capability to deal with about 95,000 sufferers in acute hospitals.

That was elevated by one other 4,000 from winter 2023, below a restoration plan agreed by then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

Later in her proof, Ms Pritchard mentioned the well being service had confronted a interval of “excessive strain” within the winter of 2020-21, as one other wave of Covid unfold throughout the nation.

By that time, new remedies had been found, together with a budget steroid dexamethasone, and the primary Covid vaccines had been beginning to be rolled out in small numbers.

However the degree of neighborhood transmission on the time meant some intensive-care models had been nonetheless being pushed “to the brink” and had been “proper on the sting” of operating off the bed house.

Nationally, the well being service had by no means needed to “systematically restrict” entry to remedies as a result of hospitals couldn’t deal with demand, Ms Pritchard mentioned.

“That doesn’t imply, although, that it didn’t really feel utterly overwhelming to employees presently in these locations – and it doesn’t imply that the form of care that was being supplied was something like regular,” she added.

Ms Pritchard was additionally requested in regards to the seven momentary Nightingale hospitals constructed rapidly, in March and April 2020, throughout England to deal with Covid sufferers.

Information seen by the inquiry exhibits the overall value to the taxpayer, together with establishing and decommissioning, is now estimated at £358.5m.

The hospitals – in Birmingham, Bristol, Exeter, Harrogate, London, Manchester and Sunderland – handled 141 Covid sufferers within the first wave of the virus and 1,097 Covid and different sufferers within the second wave.

In whole, £50.4m was spent on one web site, Birmingham, which was by no means utilized by sufferers within the pandemic.

The location in Bristol additionally carried out 6,554 assessments for sufferers from the attention hospital within the metropolis.

Ms Pritchard instructed the inquiry the programme had nonetheless been “helpful”, because the websites had been envisaged as “army subject hospitals” on the time.

“We thought we had been doing it to keep away from a northern Italy state of affairs,” she mentioned, referring to scenes in Lombardy, the place intensive-care models had been overwhelmed.