Considering care in context

Talking to my colleagues across the country in mid-November, it was clear that there is a sizeable regional variation in how the second wave of COVID-19 is impacting on NHS services. The variation in demand is placing significant pressure on an already tired workforce, whose resilience is low, and this is proving to be a complex area for our regulators.

Lintern (2020) provided an example of such pressure, sharing an internal message from a medical director in a hospital trust in the north-west of England, which stated:

‘We are effectively running at 100 per cent occupancy in terms of available staffed beds.’

And that:

‘[The Trust] is now essentially overwhelmed by the demand. We cannot maintain patient flow and usual standards of care.’

The message also revealed that the trust had been threatened with enforcement action by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in a move that the medical director said failed to appreciate ‘the extraordinary pressure that the hospital was facing’.