COVID-19: Guy’s and St Thomas' reports critical care survival rate well above national average

Last month we published a summary of the written report tabled by Dr Ian Abbs, chief executive of Guy's and St Thomas', for the trust's board meeting.

Now a video and transcript of Dr Abbs' oral remarks at the meeting on 22 April have been made public.

"Patient outcome data is constantly evolving, and it's difficult to determine overall mortality rates at present," Dr Abbs told the board meeting.

"However, I can comment on the mortality outcome data of our critical care cohort. These are on smaller numbers.

"But the current outcome data suggests a mortality rate of 32 per cent. So therefore, a survival rate from critical care of 68 per cent, which is significantly better.

"There may be a number of factors that we'll need to look at for the causation of the somewhat better outcome data that we are seeing compared to the national registry data, where the mortality rate is about 50 per cent compared to roughly 68 per cent here.

"So we are seeing somewhat better survival in our critical care patients.

"One area that is of concern to me ... is that we are seeing trending numbers to poorer outcomes in black, Asian and minority ethnic patients. That is of concern.

"And we are looking into those data to look for some of the demographic or health risk factors that might be driving that trend.

"Clearly, there are a number of health issues that have been identified with poorer outcomes in COVID-19 disease, such as diabetes, hypertension, that may be risk factors, but it's very important that we assure ourselves around those causes, we understand the outcome data by ethnicity, and we look hard at the causes and see what we can do, if anything, to change that outcome."