Dorset hospitals may not cope with rapid rise in Covid-19 cases

Dorset hospitals may not be able to cope with a rapid increase in Covid cases – because many emergency beds are already full.

Dorset County Hospital chief executive, Patricia Miller, says that although the county has relatively few cases of Covid which need hospital treatment, overall bed occupancy rates across the region were now at between 95 and 99 per cent, mainly caused by emergency admissions.

She said some patients in some local hospitals should no longer be there but their discharges had been delayed, often by a lack of ongoing care packages being in place within the community.

“If we do see an exponential rise in Covid admission we might not be able to cope with them,” she warned a meeting of the county’s health and wellbeing board on Wednesday.

She said that with infection rates doubling every eight days it was likely to be only be a matter of time before Dorset County Hospital would be experiencing the number it had in the first outbreak.

The meeting was told that Covid infections in Dorset continue to be mainly through household transmission and meeting friends with many infections occurring before the current lockdown began.

Public Health Dorset says it is confident that it can help deal with outbreaks in places such as schools and nursing homes and keep infection rates contained.

“If an outbreak does occur we have good systems in place to deal with that,” said assistant director of public health Rachel Partridge.

She says the current infection rates, of around 100 per 100,000 in Dorset and around 200 in the Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole areas, appear to have stabilised and is mainly affecting people of working age.

She said that any effects of the lockdown ought to be seen in the figures in the next week or so.

The meeting heard that the county is preparing strategies for when the current lock down ends in the first week of December and hoped to be able to improve rapid testing facilities, although the county had not been included in the first tranche of 66 local authorities to roll out pilot projects, Bristol being the nearest.

The assistant director said that local testing facilities had improved from where they were at the beginning of September and urged people with symptoms to quickly get a test and self-isolate.