Coronavirus chaos in hospitals is causing patients waiting for treatment to watch Netflix in ambulances, reports say.
The chief medic says hospital staff, struggling to keep up with demand, are taking extraordinary steps to deal with delays.
Tracy Nichols, executive director of the College of Paramedics, revealed that innovative approaches are being implemented to keep up with the huge demand.
“I heard some teams streamed Netflix on trusted iPads and strapped them to the cart so patients could watch shows while they waited,” she told The Telegraph.
Covid cases are putting enormous pressure on hospitals despite a series of very positive studies showing Omicron IS to be milder than other strains, with the UK’s first official report revealing the risk of hospitalization is 50 to 70 per cent lower than Delta.
Health officials have repeatedly said that Covid-boosted injections protect against Omicron and offer the best chance of beating the pandemic.
The Sun’s Jabs campaign is helping to get vital extra vaccines into the arms of the British to avoid the need for further restrictions.
Speaking to The Telegraph, Ms Nichols revealed that desperate patients are facing deterioration in parking, which leads to ambulance personnel working in a full-time ‘conflict resolution’ mode.
She said, “I never thought we would be in a situation where patients would die waiting in ambulances at the back of hospitals.
“It’s as if we’ve become numb, which is not good news at the moment.
“But it’s actually horrible and something has to change.”
As hospitals manipulate their staff who are unable to work due to Covid, some patients have to wait more than seven hours to be tested.
The Telegraph reported that in some cases, patients had been waiting “for more than 24 hours for an ambulance to arrive”.
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This comes at a time when 24 health institutions have announced serious incidents, with pressure mounting on Boris Johnson to reduce the length of the Covid isolation.
With the spread of a moderate variant of Omicron, the seven-day isolation period is causing a shortage of staff in hospitals, amid demands to reduce it to five days.
Transport Secretary Grant Shapps told Sky News he defended the government’s decision not to override Plan B restrictions for England despite pressure on the NHS.
He told Sky News on Thursday: “We’re always trying to find the right compromise to be very strict about restrictions – locks, let’s face it, have a lot of associated costs.”
On the other hand, we don’t want to invade our hospitals. This is where I think Plan B has proven to be the right approach so far.
Data shows that 90 percent of Covid patients in the intensive care unit have not yet received the life-saving booster injections, despite the fact that the injections protect against Omicron and offer the best chance of beating the pandemic, they have been repeatedly said by health officials.
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The number of Covid deaths in the UK has exceeded 150,000 since the start of the pandemic
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