Dudley hospital boss welcomes fall in Covid-19 patients
A health chief in the Black Country has welcomed a fall in the number of Covid-19 patients being admitted to hospital.
Chief executive Diane Wake, who runs the Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust, said the numbers were slowly falling.
Around 30 patients were being admitted to Russells Hall Hospital three weeks ago – which has fallen to 10 to 15 daily.
She said: "We are beginning to come through the second wave of the pandemic but that's only really been since this week.
"We have still seen a lot of pressure on our front door services, particularly the emergency department with high numbers of admissions and very sick people still coming into the organisation.
"But the numbers are reducing. So since the first of September, so far within the trust we've seen and treated 1,784 inpatients and since Covid began 2,829 in total.
"We've currently got 181 inpatients, which is much better than when we had the last public board meeting, so the numbers are reducing – although quite slowly.
"Last week around this time we had around 190. The numbers are going down but quite slowly.
"The new patients we're admitting on a daily basis are again reducing as well – three weeks ago we were admitting about 30 patients per day but we're now down to sort of 10 and 15 patients. Only eight yesterday which is a real positive sign as well.
Sacrifice
"We are discharging patients home but sadly we're still seeing people die from coronavirus – we've had total deaths of 661 in our organisation since Covid began."
Ms Wake said she welcomed a reduction in the transmission rate in Dudley – which was a "really tremendous effort" – as she praised the hard work off staff.
She said at the start of the board meeting: "I'd like to start with a huge thank you to the staff in our organisation and in our community services who have worked above and beyond during the second wave of Covid-19.
"They have shown, continuously, resilience, flexibility, commitment, and have made a tremendous effort often at great personal sacrifice.
"Without them we wouldn't be where we are now – they have been absolutely amazing and I can't praise them enough. We've also had support from the military – they're with us for about another week and we've got 24 of those people.
"They've been helping us with transfers and various other things within the organisation – they're very young people with energy and enthuisiam, and we've welcomed every bit of support they've given us within the trust. They've been absolutely fantastic."
