Miles Scott, Chief Executive of Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust [MTW], which runs the hospital in Pembury, says that in the last few weeks the trust has been through an ‘extraordinary peak of Covid’.
Speaking at a meeting of the Kent trust’s board today [Thursday, January 28] he said that numbers were beginning to come down.
“We have got about 100 fewer patients in our hospitals with Covid than we had at New Year and that number keeps reducing by a small number each day, and we are also past the peak in terms of staffing absence,” he said.
“It was those two things compounded together that made such an extraordinary pressure for us.”
But Mr Scott said that critical care at the Kent trust remains under pressure.
“We have been having to provide a kind of battlefield medicine, if you will, and we need to get back to what we want to be delivering,” he said, adding: “But we need to be clear we are still twice the first wave peak and we should be particularly conscious of the fact that critical care is still at its peak.”
