Coronavirus: Intensive Care
(asked on 16th March 2020) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what the national capacity of (a) intensive care unit beds and (b) ventilators is; what level of capacity he estimates reaching in the next four weeks; and what proportion of covid-19 cases are likely to require (i) intensive care, (ii) oxygen therapy and (iii) ventilation treatment.
The standard capacity of the National Health Service’s critical care beds in the United Kingdom is approximately 4,000. The number of critical care beds available to the NHS has risen by over 3,000. This does not include further additional capacity being created in Nightingale Hospitals.
At the start of the crisis in March the NHS across the UK had access to over 8,000 mechanical ventilators. The number of mechanical and non-invasive ventilators sourced for the NHS has increased by over 4,000. These figures are expected to rise as we procure further equipment and products from the Prime Minister’s ventilator challenge.
NHS capacity predictors show that the NHS remains with sufficient capacity to meet and exceed demand. Modelling by Imperial College London has predicted intensive care capacity usage which can be found at: