The real challenge of the impact of staff who have to furlough, staff who are in isolation … it’s averaging around 5,000 healthcare workers every single day alongside the surge in hospitalisation as a result of the Omicron variant wave …
We may well be at the peak or reaching the peak, that impact will be felt in our hospitals, in our ICU beds, over the next 2, 3, 4 weeks, with an already exhausted workforce. But it’s really the combination of staff absences as well as the highest hospitalisation numbers that we have seen throughout this pandemic that means that now is the right time to implement this system-wide code brown.
I want to make the point, and stress the point, that this is something that we have been planning for.