I have to have these conversations quite regularly. Only yesterday we postponed a cancer operation for somebody who needed an ICU bed post-operatively and we could not provide it. Part of the reason there was no bed is because we had been up at 2 am doing another operation on an emergency patient that needed an ICU bed.
There is a huge backlog of patients. Some of them quite poorly. ICU staff are knackered. People who normally work in theatres such as scrub nurses and anaesthetic nurses and anaesthetists have all been working in ICU (ours has doubled in size and the ‘cold’ ICU is actually situated in a theatre recovery area).
When this starts to get better you can;t ask all the people who have been putting in a massive shift on ICU to suddenly start back in theatres at full gas to deal with the backlog.
You can’t use the private sector for a lot of the cases becuase they are too sick. We do hip and knee replacements on some quite ill patients now and most of the private sector does not have good out of hours cover or any critical care facilities.
I am working nights and long days, backfilling the junior doctors from the anaesthetic rota that are on ICU.
The staff are generally knackered. It’s not that they do not want to do the other work, but there is just too much of it and not the support or physical space to do it.
