Over the past few weeks our hospitals have seen a steady and consistent decline in new admissions related to Covid-19 and at the time of writing, we are caring for just one Covid-19 positive patient at Bassetlaw Hospital and five at Doncaster Royal Infirmary, with our last new confirmed case on 13 August.
When the challenges of the pandemic became apparent, and the priorities were to protect our patients and staff against Covid-19, we had to fundamentally change the way we deliver care. This unfortunately meant the postponement of many surgeries and treatments classed as ‘elective’ and therefore not an emergency. We now have the opportunity to restore these services to as near-normal as we can and throughout the past few weeks we have been working hard to increase the capacity for those patients on our waiting lists who have waited longer than would have previously been expected.
Although the number of new infections requiring admission to hospital remains low, it is important everyone remain vigilant as Covid-19 is still circulating in our communities. As a result, we simply do not have the option of simply restoring everything to as it was in March, before the pandemic. We need to ensure that appropriate safety measures and suitable arrangements are in place so that both our health professionals and patients benefit from high standards of infection control. While this is entirely the right thing to do given the circumstances, it does reduce the number of procedures or appointments that can be conducted within our clinics, and therefore it will take us longer to work through the backlog which has increased since March 2020.
While those cases defined as emergencies, or clinically urgent (including cancer services) will remain our priority, we are now working through our waiting lists in chronological order, whilst trying to ensure we keep in regular contact with patients so that if anything changes we can review individual plans. Please keep a look out for any correspondence from the Trust if this is applicable to you.
As a final comment on the above measures, I want to thank local people for their patience during this time and ask that you bear with us just a little while longer.
It is also important to highlight that this work is also happening in tandem with a steady increase in attendances to our Emergency Departments and we are now at pre-Covid levels of attendance. With the autumn and winter months now not too far away the number of patients within this service will only continue to grow.
Like all areas of the Trust, the way that emergency care is being delivered has had to fundamentally change, and as one of the busiest services operated by our Trust, we must continue to restrict visitors and ask that patients are accompanied only in the most urgent of scenarios. While unfortunate and difficult, this is to ensure that we can support social distancing within what are fairly constrained clinical environments, and again I want thank local people in advance for their understanding in this matter.
As a Trust, and as a team of health professionals, we have a lot of work ahead of us with the mammoth task of the initial response to Covid-19 only just behind and we hope that the people of Doncaster and Bassetlaw continue in their efforts to minimise further outbreaks. Thankfully our communities have seen relatively low levels of Covid-19 infection which I believe is due to the pragmatic attitude of local people who have dug deep, listened to the guidance and have done the right thing. This is enabling us to do our best to bring services back to capacity as soon and as safely as we can.
I will endeavour to update you all in the next few weeks, and thank you all once again for your support during this time as well as your patience.
Richard Parker OBE
Chief Executive