HSE ‘recalibrated’ due to Covid 19, says chief clinical officer
over 4 years in The Irish Times
The Health Service Executive (HSE) has been “recalibrated” because of Covid-19, its chief clinical officer Dr Colm Henry has said.
New public health teams have been built in the community and other forms of care there have had to be introduced because of the virus, he said.
These changes have become “part of the journey we’re on,” he told Newstalk Breakfast on Friday.
Incidents that would have been considered “normal” in the past such as patients on trolleys and crowded accident and emergency departments could not happen any longer and rightly so because they were “so dangerous”, Dr Henry said.
The number of people in hospital with Covid-19 has continued to drop to 585, according to the latest figures from the Health Service Executive (HSE).
There are 140 patients with the virus in intensive care (ICU). St James’s Hospital in Dublin has 88 Covid-19 cases, the highest number in the country, followed by Connolly Hospital, Blanchardstown (58) and Beaumont Hospital (54).
The HSE’s daily operations figures show there are 34 ICU beds available for adults and 5 for children.
Dr Henry said he understood there was a degree of lockdown fatigue and that he would love to be in a position to give good news, but unfortunately there continued to be worries because of the possibility of new variants.
He said he hoped that once older people and the vulnerable were vaccinated there would be a reduction in hospitalisations and deaths.
The arrival of new variants through international travel meant that public health teams were doing “a huge amount of work” in contact tracing, testing, isolating while relying on people to self isolate, he said.
The reopening of schools was “unequivocally the right direction”, Dr Henry added.
Meanwhile, the HSE’s director general Paul Reid said that everybody was “working around the clock” to ensure the success of the vaccination roll out.
Vaccination passports were a key feature of the plans, he told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland on Friday.
Design and details had been built into the system and the HSE was awaiting a Government decision on the issue.
He welcomed recommendations from the National Immunisation Advisory Committee on vaccinating people with chronic health conditions.
A model for delivery of the vaccine to such patients included identifying the appropriate settings for vaccinating such complex cases, he said.
A further 35 deaths of Covid-19 patients and 613 cases were reported by the National Public Health Emergency Team on Thursday. One of the deaths dates from November and 12 from January, while 21 occurred in February.