Consultant: Covid-19 surge is just days away

Dr Chris Luke

Retired emergency medicine consultant, Chris Luke, who is back on the frontline to battle Covid-19, says the surge in admissions because of the virus is just days away.

Dr Luke is currently based in the Mercy University Hospital Cork where preparations have been ongoing for several weeks.

“I do expect to see significant numbers beginning to come in now in the next two to four days,” he said during an interview on Newstalk radio.

Dr Luke described preparations being made for the surge over several weeks as “very intense”, particularly around the area of safe resuscitation of patients suspected of having Covid-19.

There are “subtle but tricky” differences between cardiopulmonary or cardiac support and Covid-19 resuscitation.

As well as being strict about the number of health staff in the room there is a lot of pre-planning involved.

Dr Luke said there are no longer curtains around beds in wards and there are also triage tents outside the hospital.

“There are ventilators now outside many rooms within the emergency department as well as up the house in the respiratory wards and the intensive care unit,” he said.

Dr Luke said that while they currently have sufficient personal protective equipment they are still worried about whether it will last.

He is very glad that more PPE has arrived from China and looks forward to receiving regular supplies.

Asked if he thought the health service will be irrevocably changed post-coronavirus, Dr Luke said there has already been a sharp decrease in alcohol and work-related presentations in the last week or two.

Because people are not going out to work, there has been a collapse in farm and work-related injuries as well as many other emergencies.

However, he is also concerned that many people are not going to hospital because they are too afraid.

Those people could be suffering from conditions like chest pain heart, stroke or other lung problems, he warned.

Dr Luke expects that, at some stage, people with other conditions will start to come back and there will be a double surge in the number of all such cases presenting.

Things will change because of Covid-19 and he thinks it will probably be for the better.

“There is no doubt that teleconsultation will become a normal thing for GPs,” he said.

The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation's Trolley Watch on Monday showed that just eight admitted patients were in EDs in acute hospitals throughout the country waiting for a bed.

The INMO’s trolley count was the same as the HSE’’s TrollyGAR – a 98% decrease in trolley waiters compared to last year.

The HSE’s trolley count points out that there were 387 admitted patients awaiting beds on the same day last year with 231 waiting over nine hours.