I wrote an article for the Glamorgan Gazette this week on the need for an investigation into a Covid outbreak at Maesteg Hospital. I reproduce it here in full.
I HAVE asked for an investigation into how seven patients at Maesteg Hospital died in a Covid outbreak last autumn which affected every patient in the hospital.
As a retired orthopaedic surgeon, I am concerned that a hospital-acquired infection was able to rip through a small, one-warded hospital affecting all 24 patients. It calls into question the procedures put in place by Cwm Taf Morgannwg Health Board to prevent such outbreaks. The number of beds had been increased from the usual 20 to 24 and all were occupied when the first patient tested positive. The virus spread quickly despite efforts to keep patients apart and the decision was taken to leave everyone there including those who were still uninfected.
We have to question whether this was the best thing to do as these uninfected patients were left just waiting for the infection to get to them. Many were elderly and frail and seven of them died.
Maesteg is a cottage hospital, not a busy, acute hospital so we have to ask how the infection got in there in the first place. I understand that patients transferred into Maesteg from other hospitals would have been tested for Covid before admission. So were people coming into the hospital from a care home or from the community not tested first? By last autumn, the dangers of sending people into enclosed environments like care homes or hospitals were well known so testing should have been done.
Lessons need to be learned because this pandemic is far from over and we need to understand how and why hospital outbreaks like this took place.
