Kingston Hospital remains extremely busy. This is due to the pressures of caring for a large number of COVID positive patients, and combined with a high number of patients accessing urgent and emergency care. To manage this situation they have increased our acute medicine and ITU capacity.
To safely staff this additional capacity, and in line with the other acute hospitals in SW London, they have made the difficult decision to pause planned care and outpatients so that we can redeploy staff into COVID wards, intensive care and emergency care.
Patients that do need to go into hospital they are likely to face a delay. We would like to reassure patients who are invited into the hospital that they have a range of strict infection prevention and control measures in place to keep patients safe when they are there.
They are communicating directly with affected patients whose procedures are being postponed and have published an update on their website which you can see here. They are keeping this situation under close review so that we can re-start planned care and outpatients when it is safe to do so.