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?

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.

Do you know how much training you need to care for a ventilated patient? You can't just move a nurse from the outpatient department or a general ward and give them a ventilated patient to care for. It was a hair brained idea to begin with. Anyone who has worked in a clinical setting could see the issues.

I think the point was PR.

@RafaIsTheKingOfClay Not everything is kept in one nice tidy link online for your benefit. I'm not spoon feeding you the info, look at the FOI requests yourself. Maybe start with mental health patients who manage to commit suicide before receiving any treatment.

Why weren't they used for the elderly from care homes and staffed by agency nurses?

I think they did it as people were impressed with the Chinese building hospitals in a few days. They keep saying they built the Nightingale Hospitals but they didn't, they converted buildings. Impressive but not the same thing as building them, you know clearing a site, putting in foundations sorting out power, draining, water etc.

I wish they would just be honest, it would be nice to celebrate providing the Nightingales, or getting the testing numbers up without thinking, "Well that isn't quite right is it."

It’s because the NHS decided not to treat or test everyone with CV symptoms in hospital until they qualified for an ambulance, and cancelled other non-emergency life saving treatment. By the end of this year the Cancer treatment ban during Covid would probably have killed more people than CV. The whole thing was a shambles - the NHS should have either just used the Nightingale hospitals for CV (and freed up actual hospitals for business as usual) or used Nightingale for normal A&E patients / non-emergency treatments and reserved regular hospitals for CV. This is yet another example of NHS mismanagement due to politics - the government wanted to be see taking action even if it was the wrong thing to do.

Why weren't they used for the elderly from care homes and staffed by agency nurses?
Last thing I would have wanted for grandad in a care home would be to be moved from the place he's familiar with, with staff that know him and his needs, to be taken to die in a sterile temporary field hospital staffed by agency nurses, spending his last days hooked up to drips and beeping machines

Boris loves a grand gesture, see:
Garden Bridge - nothing happened. Huge waste
Tanks for firing water at protesters - illegal. Huge waste.

Dramatically building a exciting new hospital is far more exciting than normal hospitals/staff/PPE.

WatcherintheRye Sun 03-May-20 13:46:11
If everyone that could have been treated in hospital had been, then the Nightingale hospitals would have been needed.

They weren't needed, not because there were not enough ill people, but because, initially, anyway, people who could have benefitted from early treatment were screened out by paramedics/111 (under instruction).

And other posters who made the same point. If all COVID patients had been admitted and given oxygen (probably at the same point as Boris), then we would have needed them.

It is called being prepared. The pandemic has been,and still is,a truly horrible happening. It is all an unknown virus, and the worst case scenario, is that it could have wiped out millions of people in the UK, hence, places being built. and adapted for any eventuality.

I'd like them to be made into NHS run care homes.

The Telegraph reports that the Nightingale hospitals were created as a direct response to the worst case scenarios projected by Dr. Neil Ferguson. The decision to cancel scheduled operations and cancer treatments was also made in response to these predictions.

Doctors and researchers at Oxford University believe ministers became overly reliant on the ‘crystal ball gazing’ and worst-case-scenarios from Imperial College and have continued ramping up capacity while ignoring what is actually happening on wards. Projections released on March 16th, by a team led by Professor Neil Ferguson, suggested that almost a third of infected over-80s would be hospitalised with coronavirus, 71 percent of whom would need critical care.The following day NHS trusts were asked to prepare to postpone all non-urgent elective operations from mid-April for at least 3 months to free up critical care capacity

@Butterpuffed Can't speak for all but the 300 bed Nightingale Hospital in Bristol is unused and not due to lack of staff. Many bank staff are suffering financially due to lack of available shifts when they were usually needed full time or more.

Population over half a million in Bristol. Confirmed cases just over 600. Confirmed COVID deaths just over 120.

Given the low rates, I think it was planned the Nightingale would take overflow from other areas that were struggling. Hasn't happened yet and hopefully won't.

I think the main reason they weren't used was that the numbers of patients on ventilators long term (a friend's father spend 5 weeks ventilated) didn't materialise.

If they hadn't been built, then that would be wrong.

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

I agree with you

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/02/doctors-warn-crystal-ball-gazing-covid-19-has-left-nightingale/

The many thousands of excess deaths and non hospital in care homes and at home in the last six weeks is disquieting considering we were hugely under-utilising our supposed hospital capacity. How many of them would have survived with medical attention?

But as has been said, it's not over yet. And the campaign to end lockdown seems well funded judging by the number of bots they have, and their access to journalists.

Prepare for the worst and hope for the best - surely it's a good news story.

However, a group of senior ICU doctors, speaking to the Telegraph on condition of anonymity, believe the models failed to take fully into account that ventilator use is rarely advised for elderly people because they are too frail to cope with such an invasive procedure.“There is no disease on the planet that would mean we would intubate and ventilate 70 percent of over 80 year olds, because they don’t survive - they’re too frail,” said one intensive care doctor. Fears that the NHS would be overwhelmed were further compounded by a second Imperial paper published on March 17th suggesting that Britain could face 250,000 deaths without wide-scale suppression

Two words.

Second wave.

I agree with PP that the nightingale hospitals are inappropriate for care home residents. I can’t imagine how frightening and stressful it would be for a sick elderly person, likely to have comorbidities, to be taken to one of those wards. Reassuring ambience wasn’t a priority when they were building these wards.

Even though care homes globally have seen tragic scenes within their walls I can see the point that a familiar environment is much more comfortable and reassuring for many. I would, however, like to see nurses not currently being utilised redeployed into these community settings to support the existing staff.

The Oxbridge/Imperial expert set have really proved themselves to be utterly incompetent throughout this whole thing. From suggesting mass events like Cheltenham and Premier League were fine and very low risk, to the disastrous herd immunity strategy, to the belated 180 reversal into lockdown, continuing with this in face of evidence from here and other countries of the changing situation. Two months on and we are FINALLY apparently going to follow the WHO advice to test, trace and isolate, that Jenny Harries and the Oxbridge set were mocking and saying was only for poor countries

Ok, but if they're talking about closing them down then clearly there isn't an assumption that they will be needed in future? Fair enough if they were to be kept in place until after next winter as I assume there will be a second peak in normal flu season, but that doesn't sound like the plan.

Obviously I understand that it's important to have spare capacity to some degree but from everything I am reading, there have been thousands of people who should have had treatment or been hospitalised but didn't/weren't, due to a lack of capacity People have been left at home to die and sent back to care homes to die and infect others who then also die, when there were thousands of designated beds lying empty!

If the issue was that there were no staff for them then that again means they were pointless PR stunts doesn't it?

I'm not saying I don't think the Nightingale hospitals were needed, but that it sounds like there was no real plan for how to use them and so building them was pointless if then using them wasn't possible for whatever reasons.

I have also been wondering this. And there are plenty of staff. Just look at the threads where NHS staff have posted that hospitals are empty and they have nothing to do.

Ah the shit show continues 🙈