An intensive care doctor from St George's Hospital has told Sky News that his fellow staff are being 'strained to point of exhaustion'.

In an interview on New Year's Day, Dr Rafik Bedair describes the immense pressure that is being put on his ward with the increasing admissions and cases.

Dr Bedair said: "I think the toughest thing for me is seeing my colleagues strained to the point of exhaustion and feeling like they cannot give patients the quality of care they are used to giving to them.

"We are already starting to see that. We are strained. We are providing double the intensive care capacity in this hospital that we would normally need to.

"The worry remains that we will continue to have pressures, we will try to respond to them, but we will always be concerned that we will come to a point where we won't be able to respond to the full demand.

"We have a workforce constraint because it takes time to train people to do this kind of work and the nightingale hospital in terms of capacity will be welcomed, but the staffing always going to be a challenge."

St George's Hospital pauses planned operations

Planned operations and outpatient appointments at St George's were paused on 24th December.

A St George's spokesperson said: "Like all hospitals, we are seeing increased demand for our services at present, due to Covid-19 combined with a higher number of patients accessing urgent and emergency care."

The operations and outpatient appointments are due to resume at the end of January.

However, the hospital has said they will review the situation on a weekly basis, and re-start planned care as soon they are in a position to do so.

Urgent and emergency operations and procedures (including for cancer) will continue to go ahead as normal.

Recent UK COVID-19 statistics

There were 54,990 new cases and 454 deaths recorded on January 3rd.

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