Let’s be grateful for the strengths of the NHS and unite to help it through its greatest crisis

Editorial: It’s easier to produce thousands of extra beds for temporary hospitals than it is to muster the qualified nursing staff to look after all the patients who are expected to occupy them

Staff prepare to load equipment at the ExCeL London exhibition centre that is being transformed into the NHS Nightingale Hospital (AFP/Getty)

The National Health Service is approaching some of the most critical weeks in its history. As Shaun Lintern, our health correspondent, reports today, there are fears that the NHS will soon need more intensive care nurses than it actually has.

The sight of huge temporary hospitals being constructed is reassuring, but it is easier to produce thousands of extra beds than it is to muster the qualified nursing staff to look after all the patients who are expected soon to occupy them.

As we report, 33,000 extra beds have been conjured out of old NHS facilities and new conference centres, and staff numbers have been boosted by returners, St John Ambulance volunteers and non-nursing staff such as care assistants, therapists and pharmacists.

Even so, Nicki Credland, chair of the British Association of Critical Care Nurses, told The Independent: “We are doing everything we possibly can, but we simply do not have enough intensive care nurses. We are going to have to accept we can’t save everyone.”

As well as the intense work that critical care nurses and all NHS staff are about to undertake, there is what Professor Neil Greenberg calls the “moral injury” they will suffer on behalf of us all in seeing so many people die. We all have a responsibility to try to reduce the trauma.

We should be grateful as a nation that the NHS, as a single national organisation, may be better able to respond to a crisis of this nature than the more variegated healthcare systems in some countries. But it cannot work miracles, and it requires a special effort by the population as a whole to try to minimise the number of coronavirus casualties over the next few weeks.

This message was underlined in the Downing Street news conference on Saturday by Professor Stephen Powis, medical director of NHS England. “I am confident that it is possible to get on top of this virus,” he said. He repeated the view that it would be possible to keep the number of cases within the NHS’s capacity, but said “we shouldn’t be complacent about that – it will only happen if we stop the transmission of the virus.”

He said that each and every one of us has “the chance to save a life” by observing the rules on social distancing. “That will result in fewer deaths and less pressure on the NHS. It is that stark.”

Of course we should all be grateful to NHS workers for the huge burden they are about to bear on behalf of us all, but we should remember that we all have our part to play in that national effort to try to minimise that burden.