Vital equipment which protect doctors and nurses from caching coronavirus from infected patients in UK hospitals are beginning to run out.
Vital equipment which protect doctors and nurses from caching coronavirus from infected patients in UK hospitals are beginning to run out. They need some face masks and other specialist personal protective equipment (PPE) to prevent them falling ill. Not only at NHS, but also some hospitals too, multiple sources have said.
Protective equipment for staff at UK hospitals
In response to the concerns on Sunday, the Department of Health and Social Care said it would now release the UK’s stockpile of equipment set aside for when the country faces a pandemic disease.
Coronavirus has not yet been classified as a pandemic. To solve this problem, doctors have been told to limit their use of face masks during procedures and surgeries to try and maintain supplies while NHS England said it would be shipping PPE to GPs this week amid concerns they lack enough equipment.
They said: “PPE is about to become a major issue. We’ve got a problem and NHS Supply Chain are invisible on the issue and the national command team are keeping silent. We will be out of PPE in two weeks with no supplies on the horizon. “This is going to be the game changer and nobody wants to address the problem. Our masks are made in China and they aren’t about to let any stock leave the country. Of our key PPE lines three are now unavailable for the rest of March and who knows when from there.
“As usual we are all being gagged. This is serious and I know what this means and what the risks are.” Another said: “It’s not really about not having enough now, it’s about knowing we will have enough in the future as staff use up the stock. We need to secure enough supply going forward.” Unfortunately, the world’s biggest manufacturer of masks and surgical protective equipment is China. But China has its own demand during the coronavirus outbreak, which originated in Wuhan, the country has banned the export of most PPE equipment.
Now, Public Health England has changed its guidance how to treating suspected but nit confirmed cases of coronavirus for staff. Workers told to use ordinal surgical masks rather than increasingly scarce respirators. A senior nurse from an NHS trust in the north of England told “Public Health England won’t release the national stockpile until the pandemic threshold is reached. They need to move on from swabbing everyone with a sniffle as that is using a lot of PPE equipment. We are reviewing our PPE at the moment.
“I think the difficulty in this is it’s moving so fast and not everyone’s realised yet the seriousness.” She added: “Honestly, as a healthcare worker it feels like we’re about to go off to war or something. We know it’s coming and we know some of us will get infected and some may even die, but we’ve got to get on and mitigate as best we can.” Until Sunday afternoon, the coronavirus cases confirmed to 273 in UK. SO the NHS is gearing up for a spike in coronavirus cases.
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