The NHS has wasted around £13million after hundreds of beds meant for the Nightingale hospitals are unable to be used for patients in other wards. The temporary Nightingale hospitals were built across the country to tackle waves of Covid-19, including at a site in London.
The huge loss was documented last week in NHS England’s annual accounts, with the health service claiming that the beds can’t given to other departments as they don’t meet the required standard. Some of the millions of pounds written off include paying for storing the beds.
NHS
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Up to 3.5million Covid vaccine doses are set to be binned after reaching their expiry date, it was revealed today.
A leaked memo last month revealed that tens of millions of jabs sent to hospitals, GP surgeries and pharmacies in the run up to Christmas to fight Omicron had largely went unused.
Now NHS sources say more than half of the doses sent to some clinics are still ‘sitting in fridges’ amid falling demand for the booster shots.
One well-placed official estimated up to 3.5m doses are likely to be binned, based on stock counts in several English regions, the Health Service Journal reports.
http://archive.today/2022.02.05-174202/https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10476167/UK-set-bin-3-5million-Pfizer-vaccine-doses-despite-shelf-life-extended.html
More children than ever have been referred to the NHS for the most serious mental health problems, the latest figures show.
Some 409,347 under-18s were referred for specialist care for issues such as self-harm and eating disorders between April and October 2021.
That was 77% higher than the same period in 2019.
http://archive.today/2022.02.04-092323/https://www.bbc.com/news/education-60197150
Doctors are among the health workers least likely to be vaccinated against Covid-19, while fitness instructors, artists and waiters have some of the highest unjabbed rates overall.
New figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show vaccination rates by profession at the end of last year. The data provides an early indication of which parts of the NHS and social care workforce could be hardest hit by the compulsory vaccination rule that comes into force in April.
Commentary from Paul Embery of UnHerd:
Fresh NHS data shows that the total number of covid-related deaths in hospitals in England involving patients under the age of 80 and with no pre-existing condition is 3,037. This covers the entire period of the pandemic.
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We let people die alone – Spiked
‘I remember 20 May 2020 vividly, I spent hours on the phone to a man who was in the hospital car park, utterly desperate to see his wife. He begged, wept, shouted to be let in, but we said no – for the greater good of everyone else. She died unexpectedly and alone, as the government had a party.’
…We let people die alone. Just think about that. We let desperate, terrified men howl in car parks. We kept husband from wife, wife from husband. We let people give birth alone. We deprived the elderly of visits from their loved ones. We left dementia sufferers to believe, in their rare moments of lucidity, that their sons and daughters and grandchildren had abandoned them. We let people die alone.
MORE than 100,000 doctors, nurses and other vital NHS staff will disappear under Boris Johnson’s “folly” of sacking unjabbed workers, the Prime Minister was warned.
The cross-party alert comes after troops were drafted into hospitals with thousands of employees on sick leave through Covid or stress. Trade union bosses urged Health Secretary Sajid Javid to delay making Covid jabs mandatory by the end of March “with immediate effect”.
Covid should now be treated as an endemic virus similar to flu, and ministers should end mass-vaccination after the booster campaign, the former chairman of the UK’s vaccine taskforce has said.
With health chiefs and senior Tories also lobbying for a post-pandemic plan for a straining NHS, Dr Clive Dix called for a major rethink of the UK’s Covid strategy, in effect reversing the approach of the last two years and returning to a “new normality”.
“We need to analyse whether we use the current booster campaign to ensure the vulnerable are protected, if this is seen to be necessary,” he said. “Mass population-based vaccination in the UK should now end.”
Northampton General Hospital (NGH) has responded to a claim in the national press that the first Omicron death in the United Kingdom happened at the site last week.
This comes after LBC radio station had a man called John call in on Friday (December 17) saying that his step-father had died of the new variant at ‘a hospital in Northampton’.
John told radio host Nick Ferrari that his step-father in his 70s reportedly died with Omicron on Monday (December 13) after not being vaccinated.
A spokesperson for NHS Northamptonshire CCG said: “The NHS system in Northamptonshire has not recorded an Omicron-related death at this time.”
Fears the NHS could be overwhelmed with Omicron cases, one of the key concerns that spooked ministers into talk of Christmas lockdowns, appear to be unfounded based on the current data, it was claimed last night.
London’s hospitals have seen a spike in cases of patients with coronavirus, leading to fears hospitalisations are following the exponential increases seen with cases in recent weeks.
However, figures show up to 40 per cent of new Covid admissions in the past week only tested positive after arriving at hospital, possibly for a different illness or ailment.
A demonstration against mandatory vaccinations has been organised by “Take a Stand London”, “Save our Rights” and “The Great Reopening”, along with other protest groups from 12pm at Parliament Square in Westminster. The iconic location was said to be “rammed” with angry Britons on Saturday afternoon, with one witness saying on Twitter: “Parliament Square rammed with protestors!” The protest today saw people travel to the capital from across the UK and there are also rallies in Bournemouth, Blackburn, Gloucestershire, Bristol, Glasgow, Cardiff, Belfast and the Isle of Wight.
The Prime Minister has talked of giving Whitty a knighthood — but after that reckless and irresponsible performance, the Chief Medical Officer deserves the boot.
At a stroke, he inflicted spectacular damage on our economy, particularly the hospitality sector which makes over a quarter of its profits in this period, and which has already taken a termendous battering during the pandemic.
…The irony is that if the most lurid forecasts of the lockdown addicts are realised, with the pandemic reaching every household, then all those oppressive measures they cherish most — such as social distancing, bans on large gatherings, venue closures and vaccine passports — will be largely useless.
…And in fact it would be worse than meaningless: it would be counter-productive. Lockdown directly undermines the fight against the virus by preventing the spread of naturally acquired Covid immunity in the population.
The UK Government’s handling of what Boris Johnson warned will be a ‘tidal wave’ of Omicron infections verges on hysteria.
With predictions of one million cases by the end of the month and concerns about the NHS being overwhelmed with up to 10,000 hospitalisations per day, I gather there is talk of Christmas again being cancelled and a possible New Year lockdown.
Yet you only have to look at the picture in South Africa, where the world’s first known cases of Omicron were spotted, to realise this reaction is out of all proportion to the risks posed by this variant.
And I should know — because I am the doctor who first raised the alarm about Omicron back in November.
Plan B is a go. And just like that, more mask mandates, working from home guidance and, most controversially, vaccine passports have been rushed in. While we wait, of one thing we can be certain: Covid decisions this winter are once again being determined by one institution. While we wait to find out more about the omicron variant, there is one thing we can say with certainty: our future rests once again on the ability of the National Health Service to handle an uptick in cases.
…Yet the NHS has a guilty little secret, rarely talked about given its status as the national religion. On many metrics, capacity has not been rising – it’s actually been falling.
Early Covid-19 symptoms mirror vaccine side effects, according to a recent study that warns people who suffer headaches, fatigue, or fever after being jabbed to assume they have been infected, get tested, and isolate themselves.
The findings, published last week in the eClinical Medicine journal, show there is no way to tell if the symptoms are from the disease or an adverse reaction to the shot unless a screening test is taken. Researchers at King’s College London have raised concerns that the recently vaccinated could be inadvertently spreading the virus, thinking their symptoms were from the jab.
OVER a quarter of a million Brits could face a new heart-related illness due to the stress of the Covid pandemic, experts have warned.
Poor diet, lack of physical activity and stress and mental health issues can all have an impact on our heart.
Now a leading NHS mental health services provider and senior vascular surgeon, Mark Rayner, says Brits are facing a ‘trauma timebomb’ that will see them at risk of heart disease and fatal heart attacks due the effects of PPSD (Post Pandemic Stress Disorder).
Millions of over-75s in England will miss out on routine health checks until April to free up GPs to help with the UK’s anti-Omicron booster drive.
Campaigners accused the Government of breaking its promises to boost face-to-face appointments and slammed the decision as a ‘self defeating exercise’, as over-75s will flood into A&E with their health problems.
The decision to suspend the health checks came from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) in response to the Government’s mammoth effort to turbocharge the UK’s Covid booster to ward off Omicron.
Perhaps the most dangerous three words in the English language are ‘Protect the NHS’.
After 18 months of discouraging people from getting treatment in hospital, we are now seeing the catastrophic results.
A report from the National Audit Office (NAO) this week found that up to 740,000 potential cancer patients have been missed since the beginning of the first lockdown in March 2020.
These are people who should have been referred urgently for investigation in hospital, for a disease where delays exponentially increase the risk of death.
The NAO estimates that, since the pandemic began, between 35,000 and 60,000 fewer people than expected have started treatment for cancer.
Up to 740,000 potential cancer cases that should have been urgently referred by GPs have been “missed” since the first lockdown, according to a damning report.
Watchdogs also warned that NHS waiting lists could keep growing until 2025 and even reach double the current six million.
Charities said the report by the National Audit Office (NAO) reflected a “devastating” situation for many patients, with medics warning of “the biggest cancer catastrophe ever to hit the NHS”.
The boss of the drugmaker Moderna has warned that Covid-19 vaccines are unlikely to be as effective against the Omicron variant in comments that have added to uncertainty about its impact and unsettled financial markets.
“There is no world, I think, where [the effectiveness] is the same level we had with Delta,” Stéphane Bancel told the Financial Times. “I think it’s going to be a material drop. I just don’t know how much because we need to wait for the data. But all the scientists I’ve talked to … are like, ‘this is not going to be good’.”