Covid and the NHS
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 14 January 2021
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
More than 80 thousand people in the UK have now died with Covid-19; there are currently more than three million confirmed cases across the country and in the worst affected areas one person in 20 is infected.
Even with the whole of the UK now in some form of lockdown, there are more than 35,000 people in hospital with the virus. That is around 50 per cent more than at the peak of the epidemic in the UK last spring.
As hospitals reprioritise to deal with Covid cases, patients with other conditions are bearing the brunt, with one London hospital trust announcing it was cancelling some cancer operations.
So how is the NHS coping with the Covid crisis?
Contributors:
Jennifer Dixon of the Health Foundation
Nigel Edwards of the Nuffield Trust
Siva Anandaciva of the King’s Fund
David Salisbury, the former head of immunisation at the Department of Health.
Producers: Tim Mansel, Sally Abrahams, Kirsteen Knight, May Cameron Editor: Jasper Corbett
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:06.6 | Welcome to the briefing room with me, David Aronovich. |
| 0:09.8 | We're in a room where you, me, the top experts and 28 minutes come together to understand one of the big issues of the day. |
| 0:17.0 | Today, the pandemic, and you hear all the time that we must protect the NHS so that it can cope with the demands of COVID-19. |
| 0:25.1 | But what does coping mean? |
| 0:35.9 | The pandemic, 2021, and it's pretty bad. |
| 0:40.7 | This was how Chris Whitty put it this week. |
| 0:43.3 | The next few weeks are going to be the worst weeks of this pandemic in terms of numbers into the NHS. |
| 0:49.2 | There had been a previous warning from all four of the UK's chief medical officers |
| 0:53.1 | that the health service is |
| 0:54.5 | at imminent risk of being overwhelmed. But what does that mean? And at what point in the future |
| 1:00.1 | will the NHS not be at risk? Step into the briefing room and together we'll find out. |
| 1:09.0 | First, let's try and establish how much pressure the NHS is currently under. |
| 1:13.9 | I'm joined in the briefing room by the chief executive of the Health Foundation, Jennifer |
| 1:18.0 | Dixon, and the chief executive at the Nuffield Trust, Nigel Edwards. |
| 1:23.0 | Jennifer Dixon, what is the official definition of being overwhelmed or, indeed, of coping in the NHS? |
| 1:30.9 | Is there an official status level that describes either? |
| 1:34.4 | Well, I don't think there is a precise official definition of what overwhelmed means. |
| 1:39.4 | I mean, it's going to be a combination of running out of beds, running out of staff, long trolley weights, |
| 1:46.7 | ambulances stacked up. And it's probably a combination of two things. One is those things, |
| 1:52.1 | but also there's also perception and how this is played out in the media because there's one |
| 1:57.8 | thing the NHS sort of seeming to cope. There's another thing seeing |
... |
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