That was a big, fat, hairy waste of time, effort and money.
London’s Nightingale Hospital is effectively being wound down after taking no new patients in the past week.
Staff were told today that a decision on its future would be made within days.
The field hospital, built in just 10 days at the start of April, had only 19 patients on Friday, down from a peak of around 35 earlier in the month.
London hospitals are increasingly choosing to keep patients in their own intensive care units.
One source said London’s Nightingale was in effect being “wound down”, with staff from the Royal London Hospital, who were due to be seconded to work there, told they were no longer needed on Friday due to the small numbers of patients.
The situation has been replicated across the country: none of the other Nightingale hospitals in Birmingham, Manchester or Harrogate have patients.
The peculiar thing is… I’m not remotely surprised. Maybe I’m just cynical.
So the bosses of the NHS, in their infinite wisdom, have turned our existing hospitals into no-go bug-zones and the rest of us out here can whistle if we have a minor problem that could rapidly turn major without the ER. This whole fiasco is getting more ludicrous as each day passes. The new normal sucks in every way, the example you outline here being just one. STAY HOME SUFFER IN SILENCE FK THE NHS
Sounds more like the voice of bitter experience informing realism.
So the great brains behind decanting Covid sufferers from hospital to Care homes, thus being responsible for many of the excess deaths also decide not to use the nightingale hospitals as sanatoriums, but to put Covid sufferers back in main hospitals where there is more chance of them passing the virus on to someone with a reduced immune system.
That of course is if our vaunted NHS has time to see them, having cancelled cancer screening/ operations to free up staff for televised singing, clapping and dancing.
This is the same NHS that despite presiding over record deaths, refuses to prophylactically dose staff/the vulnerable with HCQ & zinc, because Orange Man Bad, despite Italy and others demonstrating its efficacy
I hope I haven’t missed out too much.
https://www.trustnodes.com/2020/03/29/italy-finally-starts-mass-treatment-with-hydroxychloroquine
You are being over cynical. When the order to put the thing up was made, there was not much information about except a massive outbreak in China and the knowledge that there would be nowhere near enough beds in London if that pattern reoccurred.
All the best medical models prophesised a really bad situation. As the phrase goes it’s better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.
If the predictions had been more accurate and Nightingale had not been build everyone would (rightly) be tearing into the authorities for not doing anything.
So the way forward should be to ease the lockdown, no? Don’t close the additional capacity, use it to handle the resulting increased infection rate. We’re all going to catch this thing anyway, that or spend the rest of our lives in unproductive house arrest, so let’s get it over with while there’s still some economy left to rebuild from.
Absolutely – it’s hardly as if the buildings are needed for their usual purposes at the moment (or likely to be, for the foreseeable future). If nothing else, this has shown what CAN be achieved when the usual NHS red tape is removed. It would be nice to think this could become “The New Normal”…
The irony is that those of us who do need non-urgent NHS services (like my ongoing monthly session with the therapist to deal with my brain damage from 18 months ago), we’re left twiddling our fingers, which is idiotic because she’s sitting there in her office at the local NHS Mental Health unit similarly twiddling her fingers.
She’s tried doing it via telephone, god bless, but given I’ve lost some hearing (another side effect), it’s a bit of a one-way conversation.
She’s going to try some “New” facility to do virtual room based video conferencing, but she’s struggling to get an answer from NHS IT about how to go about it. Any other organisation in the world would just pick a tool that they agree meets their needs and get on with it, but the NHS Bureaucracy is so paranoid about security, confidentiality and such like that it ends up being paralised.
Anyway, I said we would give it a go and see what happens. It’s worth a shot and who knows it might actually spur the NHS into doing something useful for a change. I’d far rather do a video conference with my GP for an initial consultation on any problems that arise than risk sitting around with the rest of the infected in the surgery waiting room.
/rant
The late Mrs L worked in the NHS IT department and she would echo your frustration. There were all sorts of tools she would have liked to use, but couldn’t because of the bureaucracy involved.
Has that come about since the “WannaCry” Ransomware attack, because it clearly wasn’t beforehand..
Actually, it was. They started tightening up security when they decided to implement the spine with all patient data on it.
The irony is that those of us who do need non-urgent NHS services (like my ongoing monthly session with the therapist to deal with my brain damage from 18 months ago), we’re left twiddling our fingers, which is idiotic because she’s sitting there in her office at the local NHS Mental Health unit similarly twiddling her fingers.
She’s tried doing it via telephone, god bless, but given I’ve lost some hearing (another side effect), it’s a bit of a one-way conversation.
She’s going to try some “New” facility to do virtual room based video conferencing, but she’s struggling to get an answer from NHS IT about how to go about it. Any other organisation in the world would just pick a tool that they agree meets their needs and get on with it, but the NHS Bureaucracy is so paranoid about security, confidentiality and such like that it ends up being paralysed.
Anyway, I said we would give it a go and see what happens. It’s worth a shot and who knows it might actually spur the NHS into doing something useful for a change. I’d far rather do a video conference with my GP for an initial consultation on any problems that arise than risk sitting around with the rest of the infected in the surgery waiting room.
/rant
Hell of an echo in here. 🙂
A major problem with all these Nightingales from the off was going to be how to staff them. A bigger problem than building them, IMO.
I think if things did get desperate St John’s and the Army were going to be called in, and probably dragging in anyone else who fancied a go at being a nurse. I can’t see as they would have been able to offer the same levels of care as a ‘proper’ hospital.
Having said all that, at the time I think it was probably the right decision to build them. There were so many apocalyptic prophecies…
The scaled down Nightingale at our disused Homebase site was never started, they did not even move the concrete barriers discouraging the Traveller Community.
Seems obvious to me that the NHS need to replicate the old TB isolation hospitals nationwide and let the normal hospitals get back to normal work.