This Morning’s Dr Ranj Singh has shared a grim insight into the current state of the NHS hospital where he works which he says is at ‘breaking point’ over rising covid cases.
When he is not offering advice to viewers on the ITV’s flagship daytime show, Dr Ranj works in an intensive care unit for children at a London hospital.
He said staff, who are already been pushed to the brink, are ‘devastated’ by a new variant of the deadly virus that is spreading ‘fifty to seventy percent faster.’
Speaking on Times Radio today, Dr Ranj said parts of his department have had to be converted into a ward for adult coronavirus patients to meet the huge demand for beds.
He warned that the intensive care unit is now so busy staff are unable to provide proper care to the ‘extremely sick’ people who need it.
Dr Ranj said this has had a ripple effect throughout the hospital as over-stretched and ‘exhausted’ staff cannot provide other services as normal.
“Our intensive care unit is the busiest it’s ever been,” he admitted.
“And what we need to remember is that we expanded our extensive care unit capacity by over 200% and despite doing that we are still filling up.
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“What does that mean? It means that firstly we are unable to provide intensive care to those extremely sick people that are coming in with coronavirus that need it but secondly it has a knock on effect on all the other services that we are able to provide. So we are able to provide less and less normal, usual care for all the other things that happen to us,” he told host Hugo Rikind.
Opening up about the brutal impact the latest coronavirus surge was having on his fellow hospital workers, Dr Ranj said: “People are already exhausted from the first wave and all the pressure that we had during the course of 2020 and now this second wave is so much worse.
“They are really at breaking point so I’m urging everybody on behalf of myself and all of my colleagues, please stick to the rules and let’s protect not only ourselves but protect our NHS as well,” he urged.
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“I work in a children’s intensive care unit and a section of that unit has been converted into an adult intensive care unit to help out our adult colleagues and trust me the situation is critical.
“I don’t mean to sound alarmist, I know people will have heard this time and time again but it really, really is bad. We are being devastated by this new variant that spreads fifty to seventy percent faster.”
It comes after the UK’s coronavirus death toll was reported to have rised by a further 1,248 cases on Friday, taking the total to 87,291.
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At a press conference on Friday, Boris Johnson announced the UK is to close all travel corridors from Monday.
The Prime Minister said the decision has been made to ‘ protect against the risk of as yet unidentified new strains.’
The prime minister warned that the NHS was facing “extraordinary pressures”, having had the highest number of hospital admissions on a single day of the pandemic this week.