While the success of the vaccination rollout has reduced the overall impact of Covid-19 on hospitals, intensive care clinicians from across England have spoken out over the continuing pressure they are under. The NHS has a backlog of 5.8 million waiting for surgery and specialists are increasingly frustrated at how the unjabbed have left them unable to tackle it
–
Doctors and nurses have told of their anger and frustration at not being able to treat seriously ill patients as new figures show that more than 90 per cent of Covid sufferers requiring the most specialist care are unvaccinated.
While the success of the vaccination rollout has reduced the overall impact of Covid-19 on hospitals, intensive care clinicians from across England have spoken out over the continuing pressure they are under.
Between 20 per cent and 30 per cent of critical care beds in England are occupied by Covid patients and three quarters of those have not been vaccinated, according to the latest data up to July this year.
Separately, NHS England said that between July and November more than nine in 10 patients receiving the most specialist care, in which artificial lungs were used to try to save their lives, were unvaccinated.
This is undermining efforts to reduce the backlog of surgeries and the overall NHS waiting list, which had grown to 5.8 million people by the end of September.
Doctors have warned that some transplant operations cannot go ahead and that complex cancer surgeries are being delayed, risking tumours becoming inoperable.
Nicki Credland, chairman of the British Association of Critical Care Nurses, said: “All nurses understand they have to provide non-judgmental care. But what we find difficult is that giving care to patients who have chosen not to be vaccinated has a knock-on effect on other patients. We are still human beings and we still get angry at things that we think aren’t just.
“It does take a toll on nurses and I am also hearing from nurses up and down the country about some patients who are being rude, disrespectful and even violent to some nurses trying to look after them.”
She said this was behind high levels of mental health problems in ICU nurses, who are already reporting increased levels of post-traumatic stress after their experiences of the past two years.
Dr Dhruv Parekh, a consultant in critical care at the University Hospitals Birmingham trust, which has Europe’s largest critical care unit with 100 intensive care beds across a whole floor of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, said: “When you can’t provide the services you feel you need to for the rest of your community and other patients who’ve got life-limiting illnesses, there is a degree of frustration and anger. This is stopping us from doing that really important work and helping the rest of the patients we need to be trying to help.”
The 43-year-old said that it was “infuriating and frustrating” to see patients die when their deaths could have been prevented. “It’s heartbreaking and upsetting because ultimately, when that happens, for the patient and the family, the realisation this potentially could have been prevented dawns.
“It’s painful to see that happen and painful to see families go through the anguish and also the guilt that they will feel. It’s something that we will all carry psychologically for years and years to come.”
Parekh said that Covid patients had a significantly longer length of stay in critical care than other patients, with an average of nine days; longer if they survived the infection. In his unit he said this meant that as many as 100 to 140 other surgeries, which would require stays of only one or two days, had to be delayed each week.
“These are transplants that can’t go ahead. These are patients waiting for complex cancer surgery where every week counts. It could tip them over from an operable cancer to an inoperable cancer,” he said.
Between July and November, NHS England said that 150 patients were referred for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or Ecmo, where blood is cycled through an artificial lung machine before returning it to the body. Of these patients, only 6 per cent had been fully vaccinated.
The treatment is usually reserved for younger patients and is a last-ditch effort to buy their bodies time to recover from the virus.
In total 46.5 million people in the UK have had two doses of Covid-19 vaccine, equivalent to 80 per cent of the population. Almost 20 million have had a third dose, or a booster, just over a third of the population.
Ministers have pledged to ramp up the booster programme owing to the threat of the Omicron variant, with all eligible adults offered a booster by the end of January.
The proportion of unvaccinated patients varies between hospitals around the country. In the West Midlands, leaked NHS data shows that out of 17 ICUs that submitted data to NHS England, 11 had more unvaccinated than vaccinated patients in ICU with Covid, although the numbers will be small.
Three hospitals reported that all the patients in ICU with Covid were unvaccinated: the Royal Derby, Kettering General and the Pilgrim Hospital, Boston, Lincolnshire.
Across the 17 trusts there were 51 unvaccinated people in ICU and 30 fully vaccinated.
Dr Steve Mathieu, from the UK’s Intensive Care Society and a consultant in critical care, said: “One in two Covid-19 patients who require ICU and ventilatory support will die. This is a really important message because we know the vaccines work and there are very few diseases that carry such a high mortality rate.”
He said that staff in ICUs across the country were emotionally drained. “We are used to being busy, but at the moment we’re dealing with a disease that actually is preventable and seeing patients die that shouldn’t is really awful for all of us.”
He urged people who had yet to get vaccinated to do so, saying: “This is not just about yourself, this is about your family, this is about other people. These are decisions that can be made that will affect the ability for someone else to have life-changing treatment.”
Dr Charlotte Summers, professor of intensive care medicine at the University of Cambridge, said: “What we often forget in our emotional reactions is that there’s a structural problem within the NHS. We went into the pandemic with less critical care beds per head of population than almost anywhere in Europe. So we had less resources to start with and then we have had a series of policy decisions made in the UK that are allowing high levels of viral transmission, both of which are combining to put stress on the NHS. None of that is the fault of patients ending up in our ICUs.”
She said that the impact of bed pressures on ICU departments in the NHS and the subsequent cancellations for other patients had a “huge impact” on nurses and doctors.
But she added that there was an issue of trust between some communities and some in positions of authority during the pandemic that had undermined public health messaging on vaccination.
“Managing public health crises of any kind is about trust and not all sections of the community have had trust in the information they’re receiving and that has led to vaccine hesitancy.
“I can understand that people are frustrated. In the field of healthcare, every day some of us make choices that are less than perfect about how we live. We don’t eat the best food, we drive our cars too fast, we don’t exercise enough. Our job is not to judge but to help people the best that we can.”
Doctors also cited the risks of waning immunity with rising numbers of patients who had their second dose more than six months ago yet to get a booster jab.
Professor Helen Bedford of University College London, who has been working for more than 30 years to boost uptake of vaccines, is concerned that many people who think they have already had Covid have not taken up the offer of vaccination.
“Previous infection doesn’t guarantee protection, but people may feel they don’t need vaccination,” she said.
This is a concern for those who believe they were infected early in the pandemic when testing was not available. “Of course if it was an unconfirmed infection it may not have been Covid at all,” she said.
She is also concerned about low uptake among pregnant women. According to the latest surveillance data, only 22 per cent of women who gave birth in August had been vaccinated.
Ministers this weekend launched a new effort to push the benefits of vaccination to pregnant women. In total, 98 per cent of women in hospital with symptoms of Covid-19 have not been vaccinated.
Research has demonstrated that the vaccine is safe for mothers and their babies. NHS England’s chief midwife Professor Jacqueline Dunkley-Bent has written to midwives and GPs urging them to do more to encourage women to get the jab.
*Shaun Lintern*
Saturday December 04 2021, 6.00pm GMT
These articles are designed to sow disharmony. The “data” doesn’t support these anecdotes at all. The numbers given don’t make any sense given what we know (and what is publicly available) and each article dramatically contradicts the one before it. My advice is to switch off from these mendacious outrage-mongers and enjoy your Christmas.
**Edit:** The post is unfortunately now being vote bombed. Any comments calling this unsourced propaganda article into question are being buried while inane, cookie-cutter “be afraid” “unvaxxed bad” comments are getting pushed up to the top. At the time of writing, this is top comment and has been for hours. It won’t be for long, however. Take a look at which comments are getting targeted the most. Tends to be the points pointing out that nobody is fooled anymore. Have a great, fear-free Christmas.
Funny how on the uk government site says a different story. How the end of September 71% that died in icu where doubled vaxed. Not seen October or November but I’d say probably similar. And I said from day one, that as soon as they van see the vaccines are not working there would be another variant
So when omicron rips through the double and triple jabbed we are going to be vilifying them as well for not believing hard enough….or something ?
The government and devolved governments didn’t handle this pandemic very well and as such outrage articles requiring a scapegoat is the only plan. The unvaccinated must be to be blame even although getting two shots and a now requiring a booster doesn’t prevent disease, transmission, illness or even hospital stays for the elderly and vulnerable.
Best thing to do for your well-being at this point is completely switch off to this shit. Enough hate circulating in the world already.
Remember everyone, get vaccinated. Because if you don’t get vaccinated you might make a vaccinated person sick from the virus that they were vaccinated to be protected from. Because you weren’t vaccinated.
Doctor here. The lack of NHS capacity isn’t my problem to sort, if the system collapses so be it (tbh with the length of waiting lists, it pretty much has collapsed). Why be angry about things out of your control? Ultimately it doesn’t affect me, only worsens my mood when I think about it and contributes to burnout.
Do the same doctors and nurses vent anger at obese people? Or is this just an article intended to cause more division?
Just ignore them. The unvaccinated should be a lower priority, imho. They’ve had *two years* to get their shit together. The obligation to protect the stupid shouldn’t take precedence over other NHS functions. It’s about time that they introduce an **ultimatum: get vaccinated, or be barred from all NHS facilities.** Other people are suffering and dying due to their selfishness. At this point, my sympathy and obligation towards them is zero.
The unvaccinated should come second
No op should be pushed back for people who couldn’t even be bothered to do their part
They have had 2 years to get it together, this is entirely on them, noone else should suffer as a result of that
They chose to prioritise covid cases. What happened to triage?
I have MS and I had to literally wait a year to switch my main medication. People like me, who have serious medical issues, should be put in the front of the line, and the people who refuse the vaccine should be put in the back. I shouldn’t have to suffer because of people being complete idiots. By the way I am just getting over covid and because I had all three shots it was just a bad head cold rather than dying in the hospital.
I really feel for the nurses and doctors, they’ve joined a career with the ultimate goal of helping others and are now having give a disproportionate amount of care to those who haven’t realised they are hurting others by their actions.
If you’re on the fence please, please get vaccinated. If nothing else you help reduce the potential burden on our amazing nurses and doctors and help them help someone who didn’t have a choice.
Vaccines need to become mandatory. I’m so fucking tired of losing so much of my life to this stupid idea that other people have the right to be a fucking moron. Anti-vaxxers, religious zealotry, jingoism; it’s all the same damn thing, and I fucking hate that I’m expected to spend my life just putting up with it.
Every country should do what Singapore has done.
If your not vaxxed, you pay for ALL your medical treatment if your sick.
The unvaccinated should get treated by Dave & Sharon on Facebook thus freeing up medical staff.
the amount of people buying into this tribalist us or them bulllshit is sickening.
the government don’t want you to be vaccinated because they care about you or your health don’t kid yourselves, they want you vaccinated so they can implement the vaccine passport and usher in the age of total digital slavery
the passport will be in expanded beyond vaccines into other areas of normal life
please don’t give me that *your phone already tracks you* yes we know that, it tracks you but I doesn’t punish you for you choices or exclude you from society and before I get the *anti vaxxers should be excluded* drivel a) you can’t exclude people for medical choices and b) the slippery slope gets a whole lot more slippery… further down the line when the app pings you and says sorry bud you’ve missed your 8th booster or you’ve spent too much money on red meat this week or it heard you saying something bad about commissar Boris so you can’t take the bus maybe you’ll give a shit but by then it will be too late…
I’m fed up of listening to people drink this fucking government cool aid and buy into propaganda
I won’t tell you to do your own research or not get vaccinated because it will give you 6G connection to bill gates but you have to pretty fucking naive to not be suspect of this whole situation.
Another example of how anti-vaxers are essentially selfish c*nts
Hey look, a political echo chamber on the internet. Haven’t seen one of those in… 5 minutes?
19 comments
While the success of the vaccination rollout has reduced the overall impact of Covid-19 on hospitals, intensive care clinicians from across England have spoken out over the continuing pressure they are under. The NHS has a backlog of 5.8 million waiting for surgery and specialists are increasingly frustrated at how the unjabbed have left them unable to tackle it
–
Doctors and nurses have told of their anger and frustration at not being able to treat seriously ill patients as new figures show that more than 90 per cent of Covid sufferers requiring the most specialist care are unvaccinated.
While the success of the vaccination rollout has reduced the overall impact of Covid-19 on hospitals, intensive care clinicians from across England have spoken out over the continuing pressure they are under.
Between 20 per cent and 30 per cent of critical care beds in England are occupied by Covid patients and three quarters of those have not been vaccinated, according to the latest data up to July this year.
Separately, NHS England said that between July and November more than nine in 10 patients receiving the most specialist care, in which artificial lungs were used to try to save their lives, were unvaccinated.
This is undermining efforts to reduce the backlog of surgeries and the overall NHS waiting list, which had grown to 5.8 million people by the end of September.
Doctors have warned that some transplant operations cannot go ahead and that complex cancer surgeries are being delayed, risking tumours becoming inoperable.
Nicki Credland, chairman of the British Association of Critical Care Nurses, said: “All nurses understand they have to provide non-judgmental care. But what we find difficult is that giving care to patients who have chosen not to be vaccinated has a knock-on effect on other patients. We are still human beings and we still get angry at things that we think aren’t just.
“It does take a toll on nurses and I am also hearing from nurses up and down the country about some patients who are being rude, disrespectful and even violent to some nurses trying to look after them.”
She said this was behind high levels of mental health problems in ICU nurses, who are already reporting increased levels of post-traumatic stress after their experiences of the past two years.
Dr Dhruv Parekh, a consultant in critical care at the University Hospitals Birmingham trust, which has Europe’s largest critical care unit with 100 intensive care beds across a whole floor of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, said: “When you can’t provide the services you feel you need to for the rest of your community and other patients who’ve got life-limiting illnesses, there is a degree of frustration and anger. This is stopping us from doing that really important work and helping the rest of the patients we need to be trying to help.”
The 43-year-old said that it was “infuriating and frustrating” to see patients die when their deaths could have been prevented. “It’s heartbreaking and upsetting because ultimately, when that happens, for the patient and the family, the realisation this potentially could have been prevented dawns.
“It’s painful to see that happen and painful to see families go through the anguish and also the guilt that they will feel. It’s something that we will all carry psychologically for years and years to come.”
Parekh said that Covid patients had a significantly longer length of stay in critical care than other patients, with an average of nine days; longer if they survived the infection. In his unit he said this meant that as many as 100 to 140 other surgeries, which would require stays of only one or two days, had to be delayed each week.
“These are transplants that can’t go ahead. These are patients waiting for complex cancer surgery where every week counts. It could tip them over from an operable cancer to an inoperable cancer,” he said.
Between July and November, NHS England said that 150 patients were referred for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or Ecmo, where blood is cycled through an artificial lung machine before returning it to the body. Of these patients, only 6 per cent had been fully vaccinated.
The treatment is usually reserved for younger patients and is a last-ditch effort to buy their bodies time to recover from the virus.
In total 46.5 million people in the UK have had two doses of Covid-19 vaccine, equivalent to 80 per cent of the population. Almost 20 million have had a third dose, or a booster, just over a third of the population.
Ministers have pledged to ramp up the booster programme owing to the threat of the Omicron variant, with all eligible adults offered a booster by the end of January.
The proportion of unvaccinated patients varies between hospitals around the country. In the West Midlands, leaked NHS data shows that out of 17 ICUs that submitted data to NHS England, 11 had more unvaccinated than vaccinated patients in ICU with Covid, although the numbers will be small.
Three hospitals reported that all the patients in ICU with Covid were unvaccinated: the Royal Derby, Kettering General and the Pilgrim Hospital, Boston, Lincolnshire.
Across the 17 trusts there were 51 unvaccinated people in ICU and 30 fully vaccinated.
Dr Steve Mathieu, from the UK’s Intensive Care Society and a consultant in critical care, said: “One in two Covid-19 patients who require ICU and ventilatory support will die. This is a really important message because we know the vaccines work and there are very few diseases that carry such a high mortality rate.”
He said that staff in ICUs across the country were emotionally drained. “We are used to being busy, but at the moment we’re dealing with a disease that actually is preventable and seeing patients die that shouldn’t is really awful for all of us.”
He urged people who had yet to get vaccinated to do so, saying: “This is not just about yourself, this is about your family, this is about other people. These are decisions that can be made that will affect the ability for someone else to have life-changing treatment.”
Dr Charlotte Summers, professor of intensive care medicine at the University of Cambridge, said: “What we often forget in our emotional reactions is that there’s a structural problem within the NHS. We went into the pandemic with less critical care beds per head of population than almost anywhere in Europe. So we had less resources to start with and then we have had a series of policy decisions made in the UK that are allowing high levels of viral transmission, both of which are combining to put stress on the NHS. None of that is the fault of patients ending up in our ICUs.”
She said that the impact of bed pressures on ICU departments in the NHS and the subsequent cancellations for other patients had a “huge impact” on nurses and doctors.
But she added that there was an issue of trust between some communities and some in positions of authority during the pandemic that had undermined public health messaging on vaccination.
“Managing public health crises of any kind is about trust and not all sections of the community have had trust in the information they’re receiving and that has led to vaccine hesitancy.
“I can understand that people are frustrated. In the field of healthcare, every day some of us make choices that are less than perfect about how we live. We don’t eat the best food, we drive our cars too fast, we don’t exercise enough. Our job is not to judge but to help people the best that we can.”
Doctors also cited the risks of waning immunity with rising numbers of patients who had their second dose more than six months ago yet to get a booster jab.
Professor Helen Bedford of University College London, who has been working for more than 30 years to boost uptake of vaccines, is concerned that many people who think they have already had Covid have not taken up the offer of vaccination.
“Previous infection doesn’t guarantee protection, but people may feel they don’t need vaccination,” she said.
This is a concern for those who believe they were infected early in the pandemic when testing was not available. “Of course if it was an unconfirmed infection it may not have been Covid at all,” she said.
She is also concerned about low uptake among pregnant women. According to the latest surveillance data, only 22 per cent of women who gave birth in August had been vaccinated.
Ministers this weekend launched a new effort to push the benefits of vaccination to pregnant women. In total, 98 per cent of women in hospital with symptoms of Covid-19 have not been vaccinated.
Research has demonstrated that the vaccine is safe for mothers and their babies. NHS England’s chief midwife Professor Jacqueline Dunkley-Bent has written to midwives and GPs urging them to do more to encourage women to get the jab.
*Shaun Lintern*
Saturday December 04 2021, 6.00pm GMT
These articles are designed to sow disharmony. The “data” doesn’t support these anecdotes at all. The numbers given don’t make any sense given what we know (and what is publicly available) and each article dramatically contradicts the one before it. My advice is to switch off from these mendacious outrage-mongers and enjoy your Christmas.
**Edit:** The post is unfortunately now being vote bombed. Any comments calling this unsourced propaganda article into question are being buried while inane, cookie-cutter “be afraid” “unvaxxed bad” comments are getting pushed up to the top. At the time of writing, this is top comment and has been for hours. It won’t be for long, however. Take a look at which comments are getting targeted the most. Tends to be the points pointing out that nobody is fooled anymore. Have a great, fear-free Christmas.
Funny how on the uk government site says a different story. How the end of September 71% that died in icu where doubled vaxed. Not seen October or November but I’d say probably similar. And I said from day one, that as soon as they van see the vaccines are not working there would be another variant
So when omicron rips through the double and triple jabbed we are going to be vilifying them as well for not believing hard enough….or something ?
The government and devolved governments didn’t handle this pandemic very well and as such outrage articles requiring a scapegoat is the only plan. The unvaccinated must be to be blame even although getting two shots and a now requiring a booster doesn’t prevent disease, transmission, illness or even hospital stays for the elderly and vulnerable.
Best thing to do for your well-being at this point is completely switch off to this shit. Enough hate circulating in the world already.
Remember everyone, get vaccinated. Because if you don’t get vaccinated you might make a vaccinated person sick from the virus that they were vaccinated to be protected from. Because you weren’t vaccinated.
Doctor here. The lack of NHS capacity isn’t my problem to sort, if the system collapses so be it (tbh with the length of waiting lists, it pretty much has collapsed). Why be angry about things out of your control? Ultimately it doesn’t affect me, only worsens my mood when I think about it and contributes to burnout.
Do the same doctors and nurses vent anger at obese people? Or is this just an article intended to cause more division?
Just ignore them. The unvaccinated should be a lower priority, imho. They’ve had *two years* to get their shit together. The obligation to protect the stupid shouldn’t take precedence over other NHS functions. It’s about time that they introduce an **ultimatum: get vaccinated, or be barred from all NHS facilities.** Other people are suffering and dying due to their selfishness. At this point, my sympathy and obligation towards them is zero.
The unvaccinated should come second
No op should be pushed back for people who couldn’t even be bothered to do their part
They have had 2 years to get it together, this is entirely on them, noone else should suffer as a result of that
They chose to prioritise covid cases. What happened to triage?
I have MS and I had to literally wait a year to switch my main medication. People like me, who have serious medical issues, should be put in the front of the line, and the people who refuse the vaccine should be put in the back. I shouldn’t have to suffer because of people being complete idiots. By the way I am just getting over covid and because I had all three shots it was just a bad head cold rather than dying in the hospital.
I really feel for the nurses and doctors, they’ve joined a career with the ultimate goal of helping others and are now having give a disproportionate amount of care to those who haven’t realised they are hurting others by their actions.
If you’re on the fence please, please get vaccinated. If nothing else you help reduce the potential burden on our amazing nurses and doctors and help them help someone who didn’t have a choice.
Vaccines need to become mandatory. I’m so fucking tired of losing so much of my life to this stupid idea that other people have the right to be a fucking moron. Anti-vaxxers, religious zealotry, jingoism; it’s all the same damn thing, and I fucking hate that I’m expected to spend my life just putting up with it.
Every country should do what Singapore has done.
If your not vaxxed, you pay for ALL your medical treatment if your sick.
The unvaccinated should get treated by Dave & Sharon on Facebook thus freeing up medical staff.
the amount of people buying into this tribalist us or them bulllshit is sickening.
the government don’t want you to be vaccinated because they care about you or your health don’t kid yourselves, they want you vaccinated so they can implement the vaccine passport and usher in the age of total digital slavery
the passport will be in expanded beyond vaccines into other areas of normal life
please don’t give me that *your phone already tracks you* yes we know that, it tracks you but I doesn’t punish you for you choices or exclude you from society and before I get the *anti vaxxers should be excluded* drivel a) you can’t exclude people for medical choices and b) the slippery slope gets a whole lot more slippery… further down the line when the app pings you and says sorry bud you’ve missed your 8th booster or you’ve spent too much money on red meat this week or it heard you saying something bad about commissar Boris so you can’t take the bus maybe you’ll give a shit but by then it will be too late…
I’m fed up of listening to people drink this fucking government cool aid and buy into propaganda
I won’t tell you to do your own research or not get vaccinated because it will give you 6G connection to bill gates but you have to pretty fucking naive to not be suspect of this whole situation.
Another example of how anti-vaxers are essentially selfish c*nts
Hey look, a political echo chamber on the internet. Haven’t seen one of those in… 5 minutes?