A TRAINING programme to teach hundreds of medical staff new life-saving critical care skills is now being rolled-out to NHS hospitals.

It’s thought one in ten people admitted to hospital with COVID-19 will require treatment in an intensive care unit – a demand too great for ICU staff to meet.

To help address this problem, a team from Brunel University, Uxbridge, in conjunction with 33N, an analytics company led by NHS clinicians, and CLEAR, their national healthcare redesign scheme, designed and developed a training programme.

Devised in just a few days, it is now being used by Health Education England to prepare around 100 new ICU staff a day.

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The programme was piloted last week and is now being used to train staff, including those working at the new Nightingale field hospital in London.

Dr Eve Corner, a lecturer in physiotherapy, who first suggested Brunel get involved, said: “The idea was to offload the local training burden and free up trained staff to work directly with patients.”

The online training platform teaches medical staff the basics of ICU training, how to monitor and interpret ICU equipment and ventilation.

Non-ICU staff will be able to use the platform to speak to ICU specialists, many of whom may be forced into self-isolation during the outbreak.

It’s hoped the platform will allow the NHS to keep as many trained ICU staff on the front line as possible, as they won’t be required to spend too much time training new recruits.

Dr Corner added: “We have trained 250 new ICU staff in the last three days.”