CRITICAL CARE UNITS (CCUs) are specialist hospital wards that treat the most seriously ill patients in the hospital who need ‘life support’ and constant monitoring.

The critical care units in the Tees Valley hospitals have played a key role in treating people and saving hundreds of lives of the most seriously ill Covid-19 patients since the virus struck in March 2019. Critical care staff worked tirelessly caring for patients and enduring immense grief with the relatives when a patient died.

However, they have delivered excellent outcomes for our patients with more people surviving this awful illness in Teesside CCUs than would be predicted.

These units have also played a leading role in life-saving Covid-19 research, particularly the Remap-Cap and Genomiccs trials in critical care at James Cook, as well as the Recovery trial at North Tees, which were some of the top recruiting research sites internationally. These studies have discovered drugs that have saved lives and benefitted our trial patients as well as future patients with Covid-19.

However, during the heights of the pandemic, hospitals have had to temporarily increase the numbers of critical care beds to cope with the significantly increased numbers of very ill patients. The only way that a hospital can do this is by turning other areas into temporary critical care units and redeploying doctors and nurses from other areas to work there – with all the disruption to other care which that involves.

Usually, the only suitable areas to become critical care units are the operating theatres or theatre recovery areas, as these have the necessary oxygen and electricity supply, with those nurses redeployed to help critical care. This means that non-urgent care is disrupted, mostly through the cancellation of non-urgent surgery, and this has been one of the unfortunate consequences of the pandemic.

The vaccination programme has been an enormous success, and will bring us to the end of this pandemic, but Covid-19 will be permanently with us in some form. We are expecting smaller numbers of critically ill patients presenting regularly to us, especially anyone unvaccinated, of any age, and older patients with health problems, especially in the winter months when we are struggling with other pressures such as flu.

We need to ensure that critical care in the Tees Valley can cope with future pressures without occupying theatre recovery and cancelling surgery.

We have fewer general critical care beds in the Tees Valley than the national average and need to level this up to match the rest of the country.

As well as needing to modernise with investment into purpose-built isolation rooms at North Tees and Darlington, we need to urgently start laying the bricks now for more permanent critical care beds at hospitals like James Cook to prevent disruption to other care becoming an enduring legacy of the pandemic.

Local hospitals on their own cannot achieve this, which is why I very much hope that as the Government begins to look ahead to this winter and beyond – and the ongoing work to address the needs of those whose care has been disrupted by the pandemic – it will support the creation of more permanent purpose-built critical care beds in the hospitals on Teesside.

Professor Stephen Bonner is a consultant at South Tees and the lead for critical care in the Tees Valley. He is the National Institute for Health Research critical care research lead in the North-East and has been made an honorary professor by Durham University