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?

Reassuring ambience wasn’t a priority when they were building these wards.

Is it ever a 'priority'?? The point is pts were being shunted out of hospital, causing Covid to spread all round the care setting and also to the community via staff.

Like, I get the comparison with stockpiling PPE just in case, but a more accurate comparison would be stockpiling PPE that has design flaws that mean it hardly fits anyone and then rationing it so that only 0.5% of the people it does fit are allowed any of it. Then pointing proudly at the remaining stockpile and insisting things weren't that bad because look at all this PPE we didn't need to use.

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

Is it a good news story if people die because their treatment was cancelled? There have been reports that there might be up to 60,000 deaths as a consequence of missed cancer diagnoses and postponed treatment. A&E attendance is massively reduced. Heart attack and stroke patients are absent. That suggests they are dying at home. Is that good news? Elderly patients were removed from hospital into care homes in order to create capacity in hospitals. The upshot? Covid spread through care homes. The rationale for these policies was to create capacity in hospitals. There is a lethal paradox at the heart of this. And that is becoming more explicit all the time.

Let's revisit this thread in the autumn/winter and see how things are then.

Ok but if the London one is "wound down" and not operational by the winter then there won't be much to say...

Remember the scenes from Italy of old people in corridors, Doctors having to make horrible choices about who got the ventelators etc? They were to avoid that if we got to that stage.

In a way, we did get to this stage. Instead of bringing people into hospital, we just told them to stay at home or in their care home. Few, if any, elderly people were put on ventilators.

I'd like to see two numbers:

What percentage of C-19 patients die after intubation?
What percentage of C-19 patients die without ever having been intubated?

My theory is that they thought that they would send patients on ventilators in the Nightingales, and most of them would die peacefully. But it would look better than dying in a corridor.

Higher death figures than in other countries and absolutely no scenes of people stacked up in hospital corridors (not that that's what we want but there's a correlation)... Almost as if people were dying in huge numbers somewhere else not exactly rocket science is it.

Had we admitted more people with symptoms, but not on death's door, we may have seen scenes like those from Italian hospitals but more lives could have perhaps been saved.

And the "overwhelm" we were trying to avoid with the strict rules on who got admitted seems likely to be because of staffing because there's a bloody big hospital with 4000 beds doing nothing.

We haven't invested in nursing staff, or protected them from getting sick with Covid and weve run them out of the profession with stress and Brexit. So no matter how many beds and ventilators we have they'll just stand idle without someone to operate them.

this isn't a quickly solved situation which means the Nightingale Hospitals can be closed and used for other purposes. They'll be used again when (when, not if) we get our second wave.

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.

This.

It was there in case, if they were just relying on current hospitals it would be a ‘they aren’t doing enough’ situation. Better to have them just in case.

I have a real problem with this as well. The hosptial death rate is very high compared to the no.s in hospital. Yes i agree that the hospitals should not be overwhelmed but there seems to be a large capacity. I believe a study shows a 30percent death rate for hosptials in the uk. I think this is around 14 percent in france!
France has many more people in hosptial.
So to me it appears that many more people should have been in hosptial ( covid and non covid)

That's what I mean @stircrazy2020 and @BovaryX - the NHS looks pretty fucking overwhelmed to me.

Pregnant friends going 8 weeks without seeing a midwife and having checks by phone, as if that's going to do anything useful. Mental health services vanished. Cancer treatment cancelled. Routine but important stuff gone. Contraception (even emergency contraception) impossible to get hold of. People being refused medical care for Covid19 despite being close to death unless they're Boris Johnson

It doesn't add up.

What were the Nightingales for?

Obviously, you can't expect government sources to tell us anything that might encourage panic. But in China, infected people were taken from their homes (forcibly if necessary) and put into their quick-build hospitals.

The purposes were

To reduce infection of additional people

To remover sick and dying people from their homes and give neighbours the impression that something was being done, even though there was not much to help.

In most cases, infected people recover, and can return home, which is great. In the case of those that don't, they can be respectfully and discreetly removed without the sight of bodies being carried out of homes and upsetting the neighbours.

@towne2 I don't think this is over with

What percentage of C-19 patients die after intubation?

More than half of people put on a ventilator for C-19 end up dying - 62% to be precise, although that figure may rise as people who have been lingering on on ventilators for weeks making no progress eventually die.

Over 80% of people receiving non invasive breathing support e.g. simple oxygen mask recover enough to be discharged

They were a knee jerk reaction we should have spent just a few more days thinking about where the
Money and resource should be spent. Instead, people were hunting for glory in throwing money at the wrong places.

I believe a study shows a 30percent death rate for hosptials in the uk. I think this is around 14 percent in france!
France has many more people in hosptial.

You may or may not be right. But if France admits 3x as many people the stats suddenly look less good. That said I do believe that oxygenating people earlier can only be a good thing.

So we were prepared should there have been more cases needing icu treatment

It’s not over yet. This is the first wave we might have a second and third and this could be worse we simply don’t know. Isn’t it better to have some preparation than none

The NHS hasn’t completely shut down and MH services are still operating - we have to work differently this isn’t going to go back to normal anytime soon. The NHS will be working differently in many areas for some time

Our local one is potentially going to be kept as is for another year at least...I guess they are bearing in mind the possibility of a second wave

Tea tea - that's interesting. I agree If France are bringing in more people with milder symptoms for oxygen and not just blue lipped octogenarians on death's door then that would explain the better percentages. I wonder if the NHS would move to relaxing admission criteria.

"Call 111 and lump it at home and try not to die" isn't looking like the best way to keep people alive.

They were a publicity stunt so you didn't notice how utterly unprepared we were elsewhere. They were never going to be used, we don't even have enough nurses for existing hospitals. The government can crow about what a good job they've done as the hospitals weren't overwhelmed, while brushing under the carpet the number of people left to die at home or in care homes.

I wish they’d built them in places where they could just be mothballed and then used when/if needed at a future date. Spending £43 million to build a hospital in the SECC which is going to get dismantled when they want their building back just doesn’t make sense to me.

Yes agree with what you are saying tea with the nos. But i cant help but feel that something is wrong for the deaths in hospital and that they should have gone to hospital earlier.