Last night's Southern 100 qualifying session had to be cut short due to capacity issues at Noble's Hospital.
Manx Care's Executive Director of Health Services Oliver Radford discusses the factors that meant the session had to be stopped, and what the situation is for the remainder of the event:
Hi, I'm Sean, one of the news editors at Monks Radio. Now as we've been hearing the southern 100 qualifying session last night had to be cut short due to capacity issues at Nobles Hospital. So just what were those capacity issues and what's the situation going forward? So I'm Oliver Adford and I'm the executive director for Health Services at Monks Care. So yesterday was an incredibly busy day across the entire hospital in terms of ED intensive care unit, the maternity unit, as well as patients needing to be admitted from ED. So we were already starting the evening session on a busy footing. With all the motorsport events, so whether it's TT, southern 100 or the Monks Grand Prix, we always have a safe to start huddle which takes place two hours before each race is due to start. This assesses the situation across the hospital in terms of capacity within the emergency department, operating theatres, staffing, the ambulance service, the air ambulance, etc. The assessment yesterday afternoon at 4pm was that we were in a situation that we could allow the racing to start. Unfortunately between that huddle taking place and the start of racing there were two very sick patients that were admitted into ED that needed the attention of what we call the medical emergency team which is a team of doctors and nurses from across the hospital who can provide an intensive level of support. Those patients were admitted into ED just before the start of the racing. Despite that we still assessed the situation that we would be able to allow racing to go ahead. So we didn't withdraw our permission essentially to the race organisers at the beginning of the race. Unfortunately as you know there was an incident very close to the beginning of the first practice session which ended up two riders needing transfer over to ED. One of which was in a, one of the riders was very extremely unwell and the other rider had some fractures to his lower limbs. Those two riders required two of the major trauma teams to be formed and to assess them and to initiate treatment. So like the medical emergency team the trauma teams are a multidisciplinary group of doctors and nurses and other professions who provide that assessment and initial treatment that includes the orthopedic surgery, anaesthetists radiology etc and we felt that following the admission of those two riders along with the demand from the rest of ED which was already very busy that we didn't feel between myself as the executive director on call yesterday and for the rest of the week and in discussion with the ED consultant we didn't feel that it was safe to carry on and that assessment was basically if there was another incident on the Southern 100 course from another practice session would we be able to treat that individual, that rider in there to the level that we would want to and our assessment of that was that we wouldn't on the basis of everything else that was going on in ED at the time which is why we made that decision and I communicated it to the chief medical officer of the Southern 100. It feels like quite small numbers that take you from a position where racing could go ahead to where it could perhaps cause some issues. For a member of the public listening to those sort of numbers what assurances can you give for someone who might think well what would happen if I had a medical emergency in that situation? Our ED department physically is very small so it's only got 16 treatment spaces and five of those are we call the resuscitation area so for those are for the patients that are the most unwell so those were the four patients that I mentioned earlier went and then the remainder are within our what we call green area so those are patients who are less unwell. So we do have an extreme limitation in terms of the physical space available to us within ED and we've known that for some time our ED department is around 40% of the space that it needs to be but from a normal kind of business as usual we are staffed to provide care for all of those five beds within the resuscitation area and the remainder of ED. I guess the issue with any kind of racing event is that it's an event that can be stopped or started and clearly if there is a if we have an issue around our ability to deliver safe care to the entire patient numbers within the department as well as anything that could come in subsequently from the racing then our priority would always be to prioritize the safe care of those patients that are in the department at the time rather than opening us up to maybe further risk by letting the racing go ahead again. Now I know during TT you have extra staff that come in to bolster those numbers but that's not the case for Southern 100. Why isn't that? That's correct. So we make an assessment every year based on the level of demand that the Southern 100 has given to us essentially. So last year although we did have the major incident that happened on the last day of racing that contained the racing event there was there wasn't many incidents that came through ED last year. We think it's worth pointing out that all the additional staff that we bring in for any motorsport event is is a cost pressure to monk's care and so we we pay for all these additional staff out of our core budget we don't get any additional resource from the government. So the headline yesterday around the 18 million overspend of monk's care around 400,000 of that this year that is pertaining to the costs that we've encouraged to provide the additional staffing for TT. So it is a delicate balance between the bringing in extra staff to provide some more resilience for the event versus our requirement to come in on budget. Now you mentioned that yesterday particularly in ED it was a particularly busy day. How are things looking today and for the potentially for the next few days while the Southern 100 continues? Well this morning is looking good so we have as you listen there's probably no we operate a system called the Opel score where Opel 1 is is a low level of pressure. Opel 4 is the highest level of pressure extreme pressure as we call it so this morning we've declared Opel 2 there's only a small number of patients in the department this this morning and we have a reasonable discharge profile so we have a number of patients who are set to be discharged from nobles but you know things can can can change very quickly which is why we have the safe to start huddle at 4pm prior to each racing event so that we can do that assessment much closer to the time of the event and make a decision from there but the early indications look good for today obviously the the weather isn't isn't great and it is a real shame that what happened yesterday cotailed racing for what was a perfect day in terms of weather but you know unfortunately the events of yesterday have explained but for today we're looking much better but obviously I will be in touch with the race organizers a bit later with with our update. Thank you for making it to the end of the Manxeradian newscast you are obviously someone with exquisite taste. May I politely suggest you might want to subscribe to this and a wide range of Manx radio podcasts at your favorite podcast provider so our best bits will magically appear on your smartphone thank you. (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
