Peterborough hospital chief on tackling coronavirus second wave, testing and bringing in non-Covid patients

Caroline Walker, chief executive of the North West Anglia NHS Foundation Trust which runs the hospital in Bretton, said patients who were not urgent before the lockdown, but are now, will be brought in, albeit they will need to be tested for the virus.

Speaking to former BBC Radio Cambridgeshire presenter Paul Stainton, Ms Walker said the hospital’s intensive care capacity had been slightly scaled back after initially being increased by five-fold to tackle the crisis.

Outlining the current situation at the hospital, and how it might tackle a second wave of Covid-19, she said: “One thing we’ve tested ourselves in the first phase is our ability to surge, and one thing that particularly impressed me was our ability to find out how we quickly tripled the size of our intensive care department overnight.

“We have stepped that back down now and our Covid intensive care capacity is three times as big as normal, but it’s not five times as big as normal, and we’ve ready to step back up again if we need to, but currently the peak levels we’re at are showing a slight reduction.

“We are gradually over the next period post-lockdown going to start bringing more cancer patients in and more patients that are urgent now that weren’t urgent seven weeks ago. And as we do that we need to do that carefully, understanding that the infection rates might increase again in the society, in the population, putting pressure on the health service.

“One thing that’s been great here in Peterborough is we started off in week one having to send off all our tests and our swabs for infection down to the lab at Addenbrooke’s in Cambridge. And we quickly got our labs here in Peterborough geared up for the particular test for Covid.

“Once we were testing on site in our own hospital that meant we were getting our results within a day so we could actually move our patients around. With hindsight I wish we were doing that from day one so I could have known very quickly which patients had Covid and which patients didn’t and that would have reduced worry levels because everybody who comes through the front door we’ve been treating as possibly having the infection.”

The trust, which also runs Hinchingbrooke Hospital and Stamford and Rutland Hospital, has so far seen at least 143 patients who have tested positive for the coronavirus die, however, more than 300 have been discharged after recovering from the virus.

And asked if the city hospital will soon be back to normal now that the peak has been passed and lockdown restrictions are being eased, Ms Walker replied: “Not for a while, but my hope is that we get back to a normal where we can identify quickly the patients that have got exposure to this disease and the patients that haven’t, and that we can quickly understand the level of infection in the population so we can bring patients safely to the hospital.

“So for a while the normal will mean we will have to test every patient who comes to the hospital. We will gradually know whether those patients have the infection or have had it or are immune, but we don’t have that information yet.

“So for a while we are going to be bringing patients to the hospital for elective treatments and less urgent treatments, but we’re going to have to test them before they come into the hospital.”

The chief executive also revealed that video and phone consultations with non-Covid patients have been going ahead during the pandemic, and that this is going to continue in the future as part of the “new normal”.

Part one of the interview can be read at www.peterboroughtoday.co.uk.