“We need to learn from what’s happened” during Wrexham hospital outbreak to help tackle similar ‘likely’ outbreaks

The Health Minster Vaughan Gething has said lessons need to be learnt, and shared across the country, to help tackle future outbreaks that are ‘likely’ in different settings “including, unfortunately within healthcare settings”.

Yesterday we reported on death figures being released that covered the period of time where Wrexham Maelor Hospital saw an increase in coronavirus cases at an outbreak at the hospital, indicating at least 32 people died during that period.

Concerns had been raised at the time around ‘in hospital transmission’, with people catching the virus inside the hospital.

On Tuesday the Guardian reported Tameside hospital is “fighting a fatal outbreak of hospital-acquired Covid”, and an incident at Weston General Hospital in Somerset where deaths have also been linked to in hospital transmission.

On the 5th of August the First Minister Mark Drakeford was asked during a Plenary session about the issue in Wrexham Maelor Hospital by the Leader of the Opposition Paul Davies MS. The First Minister outlined some of the then newly introduced measures to help the situation at the hospital, noting that “mandating use of face masks, new physical screening installed, a single point of entry for the public, and testing of all patients on arrival, by whatever route they arrive at the hospital” were brought in as a response.

The First Minister also detailed more apparently new processes brought in to tackle the outbreak, “When those patients are screened, those who are suspected of having coronavirus are transferred to a side room on a COVID-positive ward and are nursed by a separate nursing team. Those with no symptoms are cohorted until swab results are available. Patients with a positive result are placed on a COVID-positive ward, and patients with a negative result are transferred to general bed use. As far as staff are concerned, all staff at the Maelor hospital are being tested. Six hundred of those tests are already booked. Staff are restricted in movements across the hospital, agency staff are restricted to particular wards, and thousands of additional items of PPE have been provided at the hospital—a comprehensive suite of measures, with more measures being added every day, and, Llywydd, as I said, the success of those measures is already evident.”

With the scale of the deaths unknown publicly until yesterday we asked Health Minister at yesterday’s Welsh Government lunchtime briefing if there was going to be a specific inquiry or investigation into what happened at Wrexham hospital during the outbreak period at the end of July and into early August.

The Health Minister Vaughn Gething replied, “We’re definitely look at lessons learned from the Wrexham outbreak and we know there are outbreaks in other hospitals across the UK. There’s definite learning to take about infection prevention and control measures, and then how quickly we act on what we see, if we do see that taking place within a healthcare facility.”

“We also need to transfer that learning to our care home sector as well. I spoke with the Chief Nursing Officer of Wales yesterday about exactly that subject, about how we help our care home sector to prepare for the winter ahead, and the rising challenges that we may well face.

“So yes, there is the learning to come from it. I think trying to have an individual sort of public inquiry into the position in Wrexham, to set up anything of that sort takes a significant amount of time.  We want the learning to be dealt with transparently not just within the North Wales Health Board, but to share that learning across the country. I fully expect that we’ll be able to have some information from that during the course of the winter to help the position in the here and now, because as I said many times before, the coronavirus pandemic is not over.

“We need to learn from what’s happened, where things have gone wrong as well as what we have done well, because we are likely to see further outbreaks in different settings including, unfortunately within healthcare settings through the autumn and winter period ahead of us.”