More work, no funding - paediatrics under pressure

Ten-week-old Carson was struggling to breathe. He was born premature, at the Royal Hampshire County Hospital in Winchester, he was tiny.

It was suspected that he had picked up an infection which his young lungs could not cope with.

The team of doctors and nurses had stabilised him but Carson needed an extra level of care. So they called in the experts, and after a short time in intensive care he recovered.

Southampton Oxford Retrieval Team, external (SORT) are a team of specialists on call 24 hours a day to collect the most poorly children and babies and take them to intensive care, supporting 27 hospitals across the south of England.

But there is a problem. There are no beds in the paediatric intensive care unit, but the team get on the road anyway.

They are lead by Michael Griksaitis, a consultant paediatric intensivist at University Hospital Southampton: "We dispatch to go and help the child whether there is a bed or not because actually it is irrelevant.

"The child still needs critical care, so bed or not the transport team would go out."

The BBC has learned that despite rising demand on these services, this year SORT will be expected to collect potentially hundreds more children who do not need critical care, but still require transport by ambulance to hospitals.

This will involve picking up potentially hundreds more children who are less sick, known as level 2 – those who need a high-dependency hospital bed – but with no more resources.

All 13 retrieval teams UK-wide will be asked to increase their workload despite already being at capacity and without extra funding.

Most hospitals don't have a Paediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU), so the SORT team supports the 27 regional hospitals that call for help when they have done all they can to care for a child.

"Nowhere in our business case, in our funding, in our set up, were we ever planned to deal with that extra workload," Griksaitis says.

"When that happens, because it is happening, the demand on the service will increase because we'll have to move even more children to a high dependency unit."

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Source: BBC News, 4 March 2026