NHS ‘is on its knees’ says Dr Sarah Jarvis

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Dr Sarah Jarvis sat down with Claudia-Liza Vanderpuije on the Jeremy Vine to discuss the effect of the surge of Omicron on the NHS. Dr Jarvis gave a rebuttal to guest Cristo Foufas comments on the new variant Omicron being milder than the Delta variant. Health officials have been saying that front line health workers are already mentally and physically exhausted as they have been pushed to their limits from the current surge in Covid cases this winter. Dr Jarvis criticised Boris Johnson’s lack of action in securing extra hospital beds and staff to treat further spikes in Covid cases in the UK.

Dr Jarvis said: “I think it’s extraordinary that the government keeps saying ‘we don’t know enough, we don’t know enough’ we’ve now got plenty of data.

“What we’ve got is a variant that was only discovered on the 24th of November, we got the first case in England on the 27th of November.

“Three and a half weeks later or less than four weeks later, we have got the majority of cases in Northern Ireland, in Scotland, in England all Omicron.

“Now this isn’t just about the number of hospitalisations, Cristo was saying we’re seeing it’s milder.

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Dr Jarvis added: “Yeah, the data from South Africa from a discovery essay which looked at 211,000 people suggests there’s a one third lower chance of ending up in hospital.

“But if you’ve got a one third lower chance but four times as many people infected, you’re still going to get vastly more people ending up in hospital.

“I’m astonished to hear Cristo say ‘the NHS has had enough time to prepare itself,’ no it hasn’t the NHS is absolutely on its knees.

“It was running at 93% capacity before we reached this stage, and it’s not just about people in hospital, it’s about staff to look after them.

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Dr Jarvis added: “If you’ve got an intensive care bed, it’s completely useless without a very highly trained member of staff, standing by its side.

“We have just seen data come out in the last week in London which of course is ahead of the curve, in terms of the infections.

“That across the country hospitalisations were up 8% of people with Covid whereas people in London they were up 28.65.

“We’ve also had an almost trebling of the number of staff off sick in London, NHS staff, and we’ve just had data out today from the British Medical Association.

“Suggesting by Christmas there could be 16,000 general practice staff off sick, we are simply not going to have enough people to look after them.”



Warning of more hospitalisations due to Omicron, causing pressure on an already strained National Health Service, Professor Whitty told the Downing Street press conference on Thursday that: “In advance of the situation of large numbers of people ending up in the hospital, vast numbers of people in society, and that includes doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers, are going to get Covid at the same time.

“This will be a very sharp peak, and there will be significant problems of people providing staff to man and to generally be able to look after any part of the health and social care system we might end up with quite substantial gaps in rotas at short notice.

“Given how much difficulty my health and social care colleagues have had over the past two years saying that is pretty depressing, because they have really had to stand up and go back again and again, but the reality is this speed of onset is going to lead to lots of people getting ill simultaneously and we have to be realistic about that.”

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