London Omicron wave could push NHS absences to 40 per cent of workforce
The latest Covid-19 wave in the capital could see as much as 40 per cent of its NHS workforce off sick, a London University professor has warned.
It would be a “worst case scenario”, chair of healthcare and workforce modelling at London Southbank University, Professor Alison Leary told BBC Radio 4’s World at One programme yesterday.
“The NHS is in a fairly fragile state in terms of workforce anyway – that’s fairly well documented – and the increased absence rate due to Covid and Omicron in particular are putting a lot more strain on the system.”
The prime minister held back on imposing fresh restrictions yesterday, meaning New Year’s Eve celebrations can go ahead.
“London’s absence rate is up by about 30 per cent, depending on the organisation,” Leary explained.
“That’s not just people off sick with Covid but also people isolating because of positive tests. It is kind of going up every week. Normal sickness rate runs around 4-5 per cent in the NHS, and we are looking more now at 8-9 per cent.”
Her comments follow Royal College of Nursing lead warning that the government may have left it “too late” to protect the NHS against the Omicron wave.
Pat Cullen told BBC Breakfast that ministers would find it easier to make decisions on how to defend the health service if they “walk in the shoes of any nurse” for a day.
“Nurses and other healthcare workers are quite ill from the spin-off with Covid and continue to be simply because their internal and personal resources are low going into this because of the number of hours that they’re working and the shifts they’ve been working on a very, very depleted workforce working in a fragile service leading up to this current wave,” she said.
“They would like to see political leaders making decisions that will support the health service and them to be able to do the job that they want to do and be able to care for their patients safely.
“If that means tighter measures, that’s for political leaders to decide based on the scientific evidence.”