It is twelve months ago today that NHS England and NHS Improvement declared a level four incident, the highest state of alert, over the new disease that was infecting people in Wuhan, China.
Overnight, two patients, a university student and their relative, were taken from York to Newcastle where they were cared for on the Royal Victoria Infirmary’s specialist High Consequence Infectious Disease (HCID) unit.
Speaking about the year gone by consultant Dr Matt Schmid, who led the team that treated them, said:
“Looking back a year on, it is incredible to think that my team treated what would be the first of many tens of thousands of Covid-19 patients across the country. Although an unknown disease at the time, we were prepared to care for those first patients and experienced the beginning of huge changes to the way the whole health service delivers care and the way we worked.
“I am very proud of the standard of care we delivered to those first patients in January 2020 and of how we have maintained that standard under ever increasing pressure. Now, as then, we have met each Covid-19 patient with care and compassion in their darkest moments and as we have developed our knowledge of the virus, we have swiftly adapted to deliver the highest possible level of care.
“I want to thank my team and all of those helping to fight the virus across the country for the lengths they have gone to ever since we treated those first patients 12 months ago”.
In the early days of the pandemic the NHS set up quarantine centres for people returning from China in Arrowe Park, on the Wirral, and Milton Keynes.
At the peak of the first wave, NHS staff were caring for nearly 19,000 patients in hospital with Covid and this increased to over 33,000 patients at the peak in January this year.
The Coronavirus Response Service and NHS 111 answered more than 18 million calls – a 19.6% increase on the previous year’s call volume – giving more people needing urgent care an alternative to attending A&E.
But the NHS was never a Covid only service, and at each point in the pandemic there have always been at least twice as many inpatients without Covid-19 being looked after as there were with Covid-19 in hospital.
Many GPs switched to providing some care virtually, which meant more than 280 million appointments could be carried out overall.
Nearly 19 million people continued seeking emergency help at A&E departments, which moved swiftly to split into Covid and non-Covid care zones to control infection.
Cancer care continued despite the pandemic. More than a quarter of a million people had potentially life-saving treatment and more than 1.3 million people with symptoms were checked.
Covid-secure surgery hubs were set up across the country and NHS England invested £160 million in Covid-friendly cancer drugs that can help cut the risk of infection.
The NHS made history when 90-year-old Maggie Keenan became the first person in the world to be vaccinated against coronavirus outside of a clinical trial when she received the Pfizer vaccine at Coventry Hospital on the 8 December.
The health service here was also the first in the world to deliver the Oxford / Astra-Zeneca jab outside of a trial when Brian Pinker was jabbed in Oxford on January 4th.
There is now a network of more than 1,400 vaccination services delivering life-saving jabs across the country.
Research conducted in the NHS also helped to find the first effective treatment for Covid, Dexamethasone.
