Welsh field hospital system “ready should it be required”

The Health Minister Vaughan Gething has said Rainbow hospitals in Wales “ready should it be required”.

Earlier today the NHS England Director said that Nightingale hospitals in Manchester, Harrogate and Sunderland are being mobilised again.

We asked the Health Minister what the situation is in Wales, if there was enough staff and resource to mobilise the facilities quickly if required for coronavirus.

The Minister replied, “Arrangements are in place to make sure that we can stand up the field hospitals, known as Rainbow or Enfys hospitals in North Wales. The challenge is, as we see an increasing pattern of cases coming into our hospitals here, we need to ramp up to make sure we protect non covid activity as far as possible.

“We are seeing our normal critical care capacity would be pretty full by now. But as I said, we’re already seeing a range of areas, theaters for example and recovery areas being turned into venues for intensive care to be provided.

“We know from our colleagues across the border in the northwest of England in particular, as they are seeing their hospitals become full and their intensive care capacity filling out as well. So we are already planning to make sure that our own field hospital capacity is ready should it be required.

“That does mean staffing in a different way, and it has an impact on the way the rest of the health service is able to manage the normal conditions and normal health care treatment.

On Friday we asked Chief Medical Officer Dr Frank Atherton if plans in Wales could see the Deeside Rainbow Hospital help out Merseyside, the Wirral and Cheshire and if the arrangement was reciprocal, and if there were such plans for internal transfers inside Wales.

Dr Atherton told us, “The first thing to say is we are seeing an uptick in hospital activity. There’s no doubt about that. It’s quite small at the moment in terms of the coronavirus load. Of course, we are trying to do two things, we are trying to make sure that we manage Coronavirus, but we’re also trying to get some of those services that were suspended, restarted. So hospitals are actually quite busy.”

“There is capacity in there and if we look at our ITU beds most of them are busy with people nothing to do with COVID-19. Having said that, we need to keep very close watch, because the change in transmission we’ve seen, the increase in the numbers of cases, I’m pretty sure will translate into increased hospital activity in two three four weeks, so we’re watching that very closely.”

“Within Wales, we absolutely do have those mutual aid aid arrangements. In North Wales you’ve got three main district hospitals, and they work as one entity so that’s relatively straightforward. If any region in Wales went into a problem, which does happened in normal winters, then we do put in arrangements for ambulance diverts so that sick people are taken to the less busy places.

“We’ve never to my knowledge had to institute the cross border protocols, but we do have mechanisms that we could do that. So if we needed to move people into the English system, and there was capacity there, then then the conversations would happen.

“I talk regularly, nearly every day with CMO’s across the other nations and also with the medical directors in England so we’ve got good connections. We do need to watch carefully what’s happening because I am expecting an increase in hospital activity based on what we’re seeing in the community now.”

You can view the Welsh Government briefing today on the below video:

You can view the UK Government briefing from today on the below video: