Lack of ICU capacity was ‘political choice’, Chris Whitty tells Covid inquiry – as it happened

UK went into Covid with ‘very low’ intensive care capacity compared with other rich countries, Chris Whitty tells inquiry

The UK went into the Covid crisis with “very low” intensive care capacity compared with other wealthy countries, Prof Sir Chris Whitty told the Covid inquiry this morning.

Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, has given oral evidence to the inquiry in previous hearings, dealing with pandemic preparedness and government decisions taken during the emergency, but today he is being questioned as part of module 3, which is looking at how the NHS was affected.

He told the inquiry this morning:

Taking ICU [intensive care units], in particular, the UK has a very low ICU capacity compared to most of our peer nations in high income countries. Now that’s a choice, that’s a political choice. It’s a system configuration choice, but it is a choice. Therefore you have less reserve when a major emergency happens, even if it’s short of something of the scale of Covid.

Whitty also said, without trained staff, ICU capacity could not be scaled up quickly. He explained:

The key thing, which is the rate limiting thing for scale up, is people, trained people,

You can buy beds, you can buy space, you can even put in oxygen and things. And I think we learned some lessons from, for example, trying to set up the Nightingale hospitals, about the difficulties of doing that.

But fundamentally, the limit to that system, as to any system, is trained people and there is no way you can train someone in six weeks to have the experience of an experienced ICU nurse or an experienced ICU doctor. It is simply not possible.

So if you don’t have it going into the emergency, if it’s an emergency of this speed of onset, you should not have any illusions you’re going to have it as you hit the peak.