Niamh Harris – Doctors at a leading health trust in London are saying that valuable resuscitation time is being lost as they struggle to put on on full Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)

The mail on Sunday has been told that patients in cardiac arrest have ended up dying because doctors are obliged to put on the covid-protection equipment, which takes time.

According to the Mail Online: Although the guidance from Public Health England (PHE) is that they ‘strongly advise that there is no potential delay in delivering this life saving intervention’ for Covid reasons, it is still left to ‘Healthcare organizations [to] choose [whether or not] to advise their clinical staff to wear FFP3 respirators, gowns, eye protection and gloves when performing chest compressions’.

This newspaper also understands that some doctors have even faced disciplinary action for administering CPR to save patients’ lives without first putting on full PPE.

A doctor at one London trust said: ‘It takes between one and two minutes for us to put on the PPE and that can be the difference between life and death’.

Last night, Tory MP Marcus Fysh said it was ‘quite wrong’ to implement the restriction.

Mr Fysh said: ‘If everyone’s vaccinated among hospital staff anyway, then it isn’t a material risk to those staff in any sense to be interacting with a patient who has Covid. That’s what the statistics tell us. So I think it would be quite wrong to insist that a doctor who wanted to perform CPR couldn’t do so because they weren’t wearing the PPE.’

And Tory MP Alicia Kearns said she will raise the ‘lunacy’ of the policy with the Health Secretary. She told The Mail on Sunday: ‘No doctor wants to lose a patient. I find it hard to believe that any Trust would instruct their doctors who are fully vaccinated to potentially cost the life of a patient.’

SF Source News Punch Dec 2021