‘This is not us trying to scaremonger...please, please, please obey the rules’ says COVID-19 inundated Western Trust

Neil Guckian, Director of Finance, asked the public to adhere to the restrictions to help the care system navigate the most trying period its ever faced.

“Those are the projections we have been given by the department and experts in epidemiology. The numbers speak for themselves. When you look at the number of positive cases from the week before Christmas through to last week it’s a natural consequence of the number of positive cases to expect this number of hospital cases.

“Clearly, if the population obeys the lockdown rules we can turn the curve to protect health and social services. This is not us trying to scaremonger. We are not natural at this at all. We are simply saying these are the numbers we have been given. The impact of those numbers is extreme on our system and we will do our best to cope as we always do.

“Really, all we can say is please, please, please obey the rules and let’s get through this over the next couple of weeks.”

Director of Acute Services Geraldine McKay said it is impossible to rule out the cancellation of some cancer and red flag procedures if things get worse.

“I want to emphasise again that we continue to provide cancer and red flag and time critical procedures across our Trust although these are being reviewed daily given the extreme pressures on sites. I think it is really important to say as well that we may have no option in the coming weeks as the numbers increase that we may have to move to emergency and trauma services only as an indication that our hospitals are under extreme pressure,” she said.

She moved to reassure the public saying there is no prospect of Trust hospitals being entirely overwhelmed and becoming COVID-only facilities.

“We have to have emergency surgery for patients who require it and also trauma for fracture patients. We are a trauma centre. We have to provide trauma. We have cardiology patients. We have patients who have heart attacks and we have primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) [balloon and stent treatment for heart patients] services that go across border and we also have the cancer centre. So there are services that we must provide irrespective of what is happening within COVID and we will continue to do that.

“But the public can help us. If people don’t go out they won’t fall on ice and they won’t break their leg. The actions people take can actually impact on the number of people attending our services at the hospital.”

Teresa Molloy, Director of Performance, said the surge was resulting in more and more admissions to a hospital system already quite full with coronavirus patients.

“Our admission, across the two hospitals are expected to be between 15 an 25 a day, over the next period of a week to ten days. Back in October when we had our second surge our admissions everyday were between 10 and 20... we do have in our hospitals a lot of COVID-19 patients at the moment so these would be admission on top of the existing COVID-19 patients,” she said.