COVID-19 comment: NHS guidelines for critical care will help but demand set to soar
24 March 2020
Dr Christopher Newdick, a medical law expert at the University of Reading comments on new NICE guidelines for critical care:
"The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence have just released new guidelines for critical care to cope with the growing spread of Covid-19. Their starting point is a Clinical Frailty Score, which includes a decision-tree which inevitably includes end of life care.
"While decisions like this are not new to critical care treatment, as admissions escalate and staffing are brought into critical care to manage demand, doctors will be less familiar with the numbers of patients and there is still a significant risk that demand for critical beds exceeds capacity to provide care. The scale of what may be coming is, as we are hearing so much at the moment, unprecedented."