NHS intensive care units sending patients elsewhere due to lack of beds

Patients whose lives are at risk are being turned away from their local hospitals because of a lack of intensive care beds, doctors who work in those units have revealed.

Four in five intensive care units (ICUs) are having to send patients to other hospitals as a result of chronic bed and staff shortages.

Units are so beleaguered that some may no longer be able to care properly for the NHS’s sickest patients, the leader of the intensive care speciality has warned.

Intensive care consultants have disclosed that patients are being transferred from one ICU to another for non-clinical reasons in 80% of hospitals, and in 21% of units that happens at least once a month.

Six in 10 (62%) ICUs cannot function normally because they are so short of nurses, according to a survey of ICU consultants by the Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine (FICM), their professional body, which has shared its findings with the Guardian.

It found that the 210 intensive care units across the UK were each on average short of 12 nurses, who play a vital role in caring for critically ill patients.

The doctors’ testimonies show that ICUs are under such strain that they are struggling to cope with the numbers of patients needing potentially life-saving care, such as after a car crash, heart attack, stroke or cancer operation.

The units have recently come under even greater pressure from the spike in serious illness linked to the long, cold winter, especially with the worst flu outbreak since 2009-10 having led to 2,401 people being hospitalised because of the virus.

Source: theguardian