What the fuck was the point in the Nightingale hospital?

[QOFE]

I just don't understand

I thought it was meant to take coronavirus patients to free up normal hospitals so the NHS didn't grind to a halt?

But I've just read an article saying it's likely to be wound down as it's not taken a new patient in over a week and the most it's ever had was 35, despite having 4000 beds.

But there's thousands of people who haven't been treated or admitted to hospital when they should have been, whilst a dedicated hospital sat empty? Elderly people being sent back to care homes to spread the virus to staff and the other patients due to no space for them to stay in hospital, but an empty hospital that they could have gone to instead?

What's that about then? Like... What was the point?

Wasn't the issue staffing? If a hospital sent a patient they had to send staff too? Which is why so many stayed in hospitals.

It would seem to me that it would make sense of staffing would allow to use the nightingales for all covid patients to free up hospitals to get back to business as usual.

I'm in no way medically trained to know if that's feasible though

The government has to be seen to be Managing The Crisis, si built them. However, were anyone to actually be in them, then it would seem like the NHS weren’t managing and therefore the Gov Aren't Managing The Crisis. The bonkers topsy -turvy world of government-by-populism.
I agree with what you seem to imply-they should be places for everyone who has it in care homes and at home to be carefully nursed.

They were prepared to treat more patients though but they didn't arrive. Also all the consultants were taken away from all the various specialties to work in the other wards at the hospitals so they weren't available to do clinics etc. Now some areas are quieting down the clinics should be starting up but with social distancing rules a lot will be by phone initially

They didn't have the staff to use them. That you would need staff and they were all busy in existing hospitals is not rocket science.

I've read they can't repurpose them easily because they're designed for sedated patients on ventilators not people who are moving around who need a different type of ward setting/staffing/toileting/meals etc. They'd have to redesign again.

I fervently hope they do stay empty for the right reasons! The staffing issue is frustrating. But then hospitals are apparently 'managing' for now.

They don’t have enough nurses to staff our closest nightingale hospital apparently.

I thought the point was that they were supposed to be extra critical care capacity in case the NHS got flooded by cases in critical care. (See Spain/china/Italy)

In the end we locked down countrywide, before we reached that capacity in most cases.

I think the care home thing is probably a bit more complicated, and we do need somebody independent to look at exactly what went wrong there and how we stop it happening again.

The wonderful thing about the Nightingale hospitals is that we didn't need their extra capacity after all!

What were the staff busy doing, exactly? Most treatment outside covid has been shelved and even covid sufferers have been mostly left to get on with it themselves, unless they get to the point of near death by which time 50% of them die anyway after admission. I think we've protected the NHS a bit too bloody much tbh.

I think the full logistics weren’t considered. Person with goes into hospital as they’re struggling to breath as they’ve already got COPD but the ambulance who’s picked them up doesn’t know it’s Covid as they’re already at risk of serious breathing problems - if they haven’t got Covid and end up at nightingale Covid could kill them and that’s a lawsuit. They’ve been at hospital for 24 hours when they get a positive result but there’s no transport to get them to a nightingale 50 miles away as all ambulances are already struggling with going to patients with heart attack symptoms etc.

I guess it’s also a catch 22 - people who go into hospitals aren’t healthy people and someone with cancer/over 70/diseases/underlying problems should be shielding and hospitals would be accountable if they died due to catching Covid. There’s not enough PPE for those in ICU let alone all staff including cleaners/porters/HCA in the 500 wards for a fully functioning hospital.

It’s really not hard to understand.

They were there in case we needed overflow.

We didn’t need overflow

They would have been staffed by existing doctors and all the people who returned to medicine and transferred from their specialities to staff medical wards. Same with the nurses.

What part are you struggling to get your head around? Would it have been better to just roll the dice, not build them and hope we could ride it out?

I suppose they were looking at the one in Spain, that treated thousands of patients and has now closed. Thankfully we didn't quite get to that point and it wasn't needed. Really, they should've been putting the elderly there that were Covid positive so they didn't infect other care-home residents.

It’s almost like saying “omg what’s the point in spending all that money stocking scrubs and PPE for years when we haven’t even used it”

We might need them later.

Can't recall the link but there have been grumblings from medical staff that the new hospitals were not safe. And that it made no sense to remove staff from established institutions where they already had teams, equipment and systems in place.

Really, it's hard to know what to think. Years of austerity and people dying on waiting lists - if they were ever lucky enough to see a doctor of any sort. And then we build, what - half a dozen (?) hospitals overnight. But have no one free to staff them.

And who knows what plan there is for them in the future? The whole thing is incomprehensible.

Better to be over prepared than under, I ghess. But yes, it does seem like a public inquiry waiting to happen.

My partner was told he would be seconded to a nightingale hospital weeks ago along with 100's of other people in his line of work. Only one within the following weeks was seconded, my partner still hasn't been!
Now he's received news he will probably be in a big city hospital instead. So yes what is the point of them.

The wonderful thing about the Nightingale hospitals is that we didn't need their extra capacity after all!

That's an incredibly naive thing to say.

thought the point was that they were supposed to be extra critical care capacity in case the NHS got flooded by cases in critical care.

That was exactly the point. To provide more space for patients who were ill enough to need ventilation. Not everyone in ICU needs ventilated though.

We didn't see the numbers flooding into hospitals critically ill, so didn't need the hospitals.

OP, they were never meant to recover corona patients so that regular NHS hospitals could do their normal workload. They were there to receive overflow patients for if the NHS became overwhelmed with corona patients. We saw what happened in Italy and didn’t want people dying in the corridors.
I think it’s brilliant they were opened just in case and brilliant they were not needed!

it meant that we didn't have what Italy suffered. So what if we wasted a lot of money. I don't actually care, we waste shedloads of money in normal times on far less justified things.

perhaps the economic hammering that we are taking will teach us some sense. Can only hope.

False that Nightingale hospitals aren't being used due to lack of staff. Might be the case in one perhaps but not all the others. Some of which have closed already.

The Nightingale in Bristol is empty and has been since it's opened. Also in Bristol, reduced need for Bank HCPs. These staff are usually guaranteed to work full time or more, but the shifts aren't available now due to lack of demand. Permanent staff being encouraged to take A/L in some areas due to lack of work.

They were an insurance policy and it's good they're not being used but it's not true it's because of lack of staffing, it's lack of need.

Our health board has stated that our "nightingale " hospital will be used for Covid patients to allow for routine non covid activity to get back up to speed
Seems like a good plan
The hospital is staffed with rehab teams as well as social workers
Almost a "convalescence" hospital with the option of also caring for the sicker non ventilated patients

Thanks, Pineapple. I’ve seen a number of posters over the past few weeks who, like the OP, think that the Nightingale hospitals were to free up NHS services for it carry on as normal.

I wonder where that misunderstanding has come from.

I think they had to build them incase they were needed, we entered a crisis and didn’t know how many would be sick at one time.

We definitely needed them, to be available. It’s just fantastic we’ve need needed to actually use them