To wonder if the Nightingale Hospitals are open?

[christmaspigeon]

I keep watching the BBC news and seeing how hospitals are at capacity and people waiting in ambulance bats. Does anyone know if they are using the new Nightingale hospitals? I suppose even if they are open there's only so many staff to go round. I feel so sorry for the NHS workers rushed off their feet

Before the COVID crisis there were 40,000 nursing vacancies that couldn’t be filled.
They just couldn’t staff the Nightingales.

The cost of Excel was £220 million. It treated 51 patients.

Tbf, porters, cleaners and catering staff would have been very easy to find. Millions of people were furloughed, including office cleaners, those working in the restaurant business etc.

It's clinical staff that were the problem.

@Belindabelle

No toilets for patients or staff No showers No catering for patients or staff No labs No clinical waste No blood bank No pharmacy

No nursing staff
No porters
No cleaners
No caterers

A few hundred beds and pillows don’t make a hospital but they do earn you Brownie points and favourable column inches in the short term.

Bloody hell @Belindabelle I realised Nightingales were basic but not that basic: ie almost unusable. So, a fancy tent, really?

But surely there were toilets, maybe not in a suitable layout though ???
The Manchester Nightingale was the GMEX building and I’ve been to conferences / concerts there and there are definitely toilet blocks, therefore drains exist?? I guess there weren't showers in its previously layout though though.

Not sufficient lavatories and not suitable for most patients.

No running water for bed baths either. It was expected that patients would be washed with wet wipes!

All non urgent treatment/operations etc and outpatients would need to stop so staff from there could be redeployed to other areas and then staff would then be sent to Nightingales if they are needed to open. Staff from every hospital in region would be needed to be sent to get it up and running. They are supposed to be the last resort as other patient services will suffer.
People just think there's staff waiting to run these places, there isn't. They are to be used in the worse case when all other ICUs in region are full, when the shit hits the fan. You can't just move a nurse off a normal ward to run a ICU bed, it's takes years of experience to be competent. It's a skill.

@Belindabelle Appalling. I wonder whether our MSM are thick or malevolent. Got to be one or the other because they were bigging it up.

@Belindabelle

No toilets for patients or staff No showers No catering for patients or staff No labs No clinical waste No blood bank No pharmacy

No nursing staff
No porters
No cleaners
No caterers

A few hundred beds and pillows don’t make a hospital but they do earn you Brownie points and favourable column inches in the short term.

Such bad faith deception of the country.

You don't expect to your government to perpetrate a con on its citizens in a pandemic do you?

And the waste of money...!

Disgusting.

Utterly shameless.

When Nightingale Hospitals were first opened, retired NHS staff were asked to come back and help out. Hundreds answered the call.

Why not now?

@Belindabelle

No toilets for patients or staff No showers No catering for patients or staff No labs No clinical waste No blood bank No pharmacy

No nursing staff
No porters
No cleaners
No caterers

A few hundred beds and pillows don’t make a hospital but they do earn you Brownie points and favourable column inches in the short term.

@Belindabelle this is just completely untrue. At the London Nightingale there were not patient toilets, showers or catering as it was delighted for anaesthetised/comatose patients being cared for in an ICU setting. All the other facilities and staff groups such as cleaners and porters you mention were available, and in many cases more available/better than the usual facilities.

Nightingale manchester is open , being used as a step down type unit from ICU patients

Ermmm I work there and there are showers , toilets , a pharmacy , blood lab , catering , a nice staff restaurant actually , there are also porters , doctors , nurses , clerical staff ..... where is Gods name are people getting this info ?? This is rather scary that people are making these outrageous claims with nothing to back it up . Also - why ??? Why would you want to lie about it. How very odd

I think at the moment, in the south east Covid hotspots anyway, there are lots more staff off either with Covid themselves or isolating than in the first wave. In London it appears there are already more Covid patients hospitalised than the first wave, so there just isn't the manpower it seems. In Essex, they're sending Covid patients to hospitals in Cambridge etc. That seems to be a better thing to do than sending staff out to barely resourced field hospitals. And they've talked about setting up tents outside our regular hospitals.

I reckon the extra hospitals were never meant to be staffed by normal NHS staff, they are for if the shit absolutely hits the fan and then army medics will be brought in to staff them. Things are dire atm, but as a country I don't think we are at capacity yet, some hospitals are but with space in different hospitals we don't need them.

But if we do need them, expect army medics to be doing the nursing. Or staff from private hospitals may be seconded. I do actually think they should be calling up medical staff from private hospitals now, they must be quieter with not much cosmetic surgery to do for instance. Tho maybe private hospitals are busier too as the NHS is struggling 😕.

A few of my colleagues are last year nursing students who were offered an uplift to their banding to work , essentially unqualified but can perform many of the skills needed alongside qualified staff . Also work with a Dr and a nurse who came out of early retirement . There has been a recruitment drive for these hospitals

@Whatelsecouldibecalled

Possible stupid question but who was supposed to staff them in the first place? Nhs staff were already at capacity and stupidly stretched in March and April. Who were they planning in staffing them then?

At the time I saw reports that if a hospital transferred a patient to the Nightingale hospital, they also had to provide a team of staff to look after them, thus depleting the staff at the main hospital.

I am friends with a building contractor and he went to do some work on the Exeter hospital recently and said it was very busy And he was quite concerned and the business - I haven’t questioned him as it was a passing Facebook comment but he is an incredibly trustworthy and level headed person so I am inclined to believe what he says

*about the busyness

I had covid. I was hospitalised.

To be honest, I wouldn't have cared where I was, so long as I had the help I needed to breathe.

I think we should be grateful the facilities are available, however lacking some may think.

@Frouby

I reckon the extra hospitals were never meant to be staffed by normal NHS staff, they are for if the shit absolutely hits the fan and then army medics will be brought in to staff them. Things are dire atm, but as a country I don't think we are at capacity yet, some hospitals are but with space in different hospitals we don't need them.

But if we do need them, expect army medics to be doing the nursing. Or staff from private hospitals may be seconded. I do actually think they should be calling up medical staff from private hospitals now, they must be quieter with not much cosmetic surgery to do for instance. Tho maybe private hospitals are busier too as the NHS is struggling 😕.

Except of course the overwhelming majority of medical staff with practicing privileges in the private hospitals already have full time NHS contracts. Most cosmetic surgeons wouldn’t have a clue where to start with management of ventilated and unstable patients. It’s like suggesting someone with a little fishing boat drives an aircraft carrier.

There aren’t lots of military medics sitting around doing nothing; most are working in NHS hospitals when not deployed. My future daughter in law works in an NHS accident and emergency unit at the moment, but is a RAMC Officer.

Private hospitals are doing what they’ve done for a long time - fulfilling NHS contracted work on low risk elective surgery and diagnostic testing.

@CaffeineInfusion

I had covid. I was hospitalised.

To be honest, I wouldn't have cared where I was, so long as I had the help I needed to breathe.

I think we should be grateful the facilities are available, however lacking some may think.

You wouldn’t want a lavatory close by?

Staffing was always the issue with the Nightingale hospitals. There was a national shortage of nurses etc before covid, and now with high numbers off sick, with covid, or self-isolating, the situation is now dire. Critical care / ITU staff are highly trained and so you can't just train people up to run them overnight. Many hospitals have been struggling to staff their ITUs as it is and have been 'borrowing' staff from other wards / non-emergency surgery to cover. I know some staff that have been sent to ITUs that had never previously worked a shift in ITU in their life. There was never going to be enough staff to cover the Nightingales. The whole thing was mostly a PR exercise.

It's the same reason some people have wandered into hospitals stating that the hospitals are 'quiet' and so this is all a hoax. Eventually when staffing gets critically low you cancel all planned operations, outpatient clinics etc to divert clinical staff to emergency care only. Even A&E's have a limit and will eventually just divert patients to other A&Es. So yes many hospitals worst hit will seem 'quiet' because there's no staff to run them properly and so most things have been cancelled. So yes if you just wander in off the street with an untrained eye it would look 'quiet'.