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?

Years of austerity and people dying on waiting lists - if they were ever lucky enough to see a doctor of any sort.

Care to back that up with a fact or two?

@daisyjgrey I'd prefer them to be full of people being treated with a good chance of recovery rather than half empty hospitals and 30000 dead.

Imagine what it could have been like if we had desperately needed them and they weren't there.

They haven't come into their own yet because existing ICUs have not been overwhelmed

largely due to the criteria for admission which had to be met. So high, that some were left to suffer at home until it was too late.

They never had the staff to use it. Giant white elephant.

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

Because there wasn't enough PPE to enable them to be staffed. Because Covid patients weren't brought in until the very last minute Because elderly covid patients were being discharged back to care homes. Because all non-Covid work was cancelled.

Is that wonderful?

I’m sure your OP would be different if they hadn’t been built and the hospitals had been overwhelmed. They are there now as insurance. It is good they weren’t used, our local one was staffed but they were stood down due to lack of patients (a friend worked there).

It is true I think that some people were admitted too late but scientists are still working out how best to treat this virus and fingers crossed we’ll get better at it. Probably people on mumsnet etc braying about only ‘selfish cunts’ went to hospital if they had covid and had been told not to by 111 despite gasping for breath probably didn’t help matters either.

@cdtaylornats LMFGTFY

''10,000 more patients die each year on waiting lists''

The statistics come from only half of England’s hospital trusts, suggesting the true figure is higher.
The figures, released under a Freedom of Information request, show the number of people who died on a waiting list in one trust in the Southwest rose from 652 in 2012/13 to 2,289 in 2017/18 – an increase of 250 per cent.
www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1011821/10000-more-patients-die-each-year-on-waiting-lists

It was in case we had so many cases there was overflow from the usual hospitals.

The only thing we seemed to want to do was to ensure the NHS did not have too many people in it and wards in some cases empty even if loads then died at home and could not get ambulances ensuring the NHS was not in reality there for most of us when we needed it. We need a huge revamp of it next year when the dust settles. 1.4m people work for it.

Why cdtaylornats, were you not around then?

Amazing that many MNers are 'in the know' about why the Nightingale hospitals were hardly used. Links ?

Are the people in the waiting list dying of the thing they are waiting to be treated for? Or is it people who happen to be on a waiting list when they die?

Most of the normal NhS services were reduced or stopped and people have stayed away and had fewer accidents. So staff were redeployed. The call us out to get NHS up and running as ‘normal’ in the next 6 weeks. There will be a huge backlog of cases fir screening and ops. Lockdown looks likely to ease so people will have RTAs again. And Covid will be ongoing with potentially a second wave.

We may need to nightingales for surge capacity (not necessarily the most poorly patients), bank staff are going to be employed again, the NHS is going to be massively busy - 5 weeks of invasive cancer screens have now been missed, very little non emergency operations and people who gave survived Covid with long lasting health problems.

Given we have a 40k shortage of nurses, who ever thought it would be possible to staff them?

It was was to cope with a huge spike in cases if we couldn’t manage to stop hospitals being overwhelmed. It was to save lives. And thank god we haven’t needed it.
We didn’t actually ‘build’ a hospital, we put equipment into the Excel centre.

Amazing that many MNers are 'in the know' about why the Nightingale hospitals were hardly used. Links?

How about opening your eyes and ears? The scandal over lack of PPE has been ongoing for weeks. The scandal over discharging of elderly pts with Covid back to their care homes (to spread the virus to staff and residents there) is all over the news. The scandal over the cancellation of all other NHS work is also all over the news.

To be seen to be doing whilst at the same time leaving people at home to die.
The late stage people are able to be admitted has let the government claim we have plenty of capacity
Luckily we are in the safe hands of superman Boris who has made the most remarkable recovery known to man. Near deaths door and back working again. Everyone I know who has had it bad enough to be admitted, and some who haven't, have taken weeks to start recovering energy. He is one in a million
Perhaps research could be undertaken to identify what makes him so superhuman

The hospitals are quite likely to be needed in the future. There is almost certainly going to be a second wave and will quite likely be worse than the first.

Once things start going back to anything like normal it will happen

Exactly EdwynCollins. It's almost as if they were purely preoccupied with the number of deaths occurring in hospitals, isn't it? Oh wait... they were until outcry forced care homes and death in the wider community numbers to be included.

We set up the hospitals and postponed routine stuff to deal with a huge wave of patients and then we used the lockdown to manage to keep it to a smaller number. That's a success.

Should we be disappointed that we didn't need them? We may still yet.

It’s not over yet. Plus, in a briefing a few weeks ago Witty seemed to be suggesting that the nightingales could become Covid hospitals so all other hospitals could go back to exclusively non-COVID treatment and be back up to speed.

That seems like a sensible plan, I'm sure someone will manage to be outraged by it.

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

Our closest Nightingale hospital had to stop people trying to apply for jobs, as there were so many applicants and nothing for them to do.

I have no idea why we didn't seem to have the scenes inside our hospitals like were reported in Wuhan and Lombardy and parts of Spain.

Because we had more draconian criteria for admission to hospital. That may be the route a society chooses to take - preventing understaffed and underfunded hospitals from being overwhelmed by rationing admissions - but tell it like it is, don't pretend it was due to fantastic management of the crisis, and that all those who died would have died anyway, because it's just not so.