Intensive care capacity must be permanently doubled, says Nightingale chief

Intensive care capacity in London must be doubled on a permanent basis following the coronavirus pandemic, according to the chief executive of the city’s temporary Nightingale hospital.

Speaking to an online webinar hosted by the Royal Society of Medicine, Professor Charles Knight said London had around 800 critical care beds under normal operations but “there’s a clear plan to double intensive care unit capacity on a permanent basis”.

He added: “We must have a system of healthcare in this country that means, if this ever happened again, that we wouldn’t have to do this, that we wouldn’t have to build an intensive care unit in a conference centre because we had enough capacity under usual operating so that we could cope with surge.”

It would also mean the NHS would no longer be in a position “where lots of patients, as we all know, get cancelled every year for lack of an ITU bed,” he said.

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Source: HSJ, 28 April 2020