To think the NHS can't fund this or run it?

[namechangeddforthiss]

Iv just seen this about my local hospital! Why are they building more "nightingales" staff are walking out / firing the unvaxxed, the NHS has no money? But yet they have the money to build this! We didn't even have this last year or in 2020 when covid was running through everyone so why now!

Makes me wonder are they doing it to scare us or does the government know something we don't?

I'm assuming now because that hospital is struggling with how many covid patients they have - now?

Staffing is a whole other mess. Good luck on that one.

@RoomOfRequirement it's not anywhere near as bad as it has been thats why I cant make sense of it, plus with the imminent reduction in stuff it makes 0 sense

Maybe they'd like to equip the hospital with enough beds to treat things other than COVID? Most hospitals have coped over the past two years by pretty much cancelling everything that wasnt immediately life threatening but how much longer do we want to carry on that way? I guess a Nightingale tent is better than pitching people onto the streets to free up beds.

[quote namechangeddforthiss]@RoomOfRequirement it's not anywhere near as bad as it has been thats why I cant make sense of it, plus with the imminent reduction in stuff it makes 0 sense [/quote]
How do you know it's not as bad as its been? Hospitals have huge amounts of sickness plus increased patients from covid.

Where are the stats on ‘it’s not as bad as it has been’?
The death rate from Covid is now much lower than early in the pandemic. But the amount of cases are massively increased. So there are still a lot of hospitalisations.
Also, early on in the pandemic, non-urgent procedures were cancelled. Staff were moved to staff Covid wards, leave was cancelled. Staff lived away from families for months. This isn’t sustainable.

There is an expectation that the nhs is supposed to be carrying on with all the non urgent treatment, prioritising urgent treatment, and still coping with Covid.
I’m having chemotherapy currently- this is being prioritised in my hospital over other treatments. Even so I was waiting for a bed to start treatment and I’ve spoken to multiple people that have had tests delayed and in one case treatment delayed as they didn’t have capacity to start it when planned. My initial tests were delayed too. In our area cancer operations are being moved to private hospitals as there aren’t the beds to do the operations required in the nhs hospital.

I do agree that there is no point having buildings without the right staff though! But just think this attitude that Covid isn’t causing increased strain is very very wrong.

This is the worst two weeks of the pandemic for my hospital trust. We have more beds occupied now than at any other time. We have every physical footprint in the building open and nowhere to go.

This is not because covid is 'worse', the number of people with covid in our hospitals is around 70% of wave 2. However we have many many more medical patients in beds, patients are experiencing increasing delays to discharge and the infection control issues are virtually unmanageable. Last January we had stood down most routine inpatient surgery, there had been some societal restrictions over autumn into Christmas so community rates of covid were lower and we had significantly lower staff sickness/vivid isolation.

We don't have a plan to build extra capacity, we are just crossing fingers that we have reached the peak of this wave. I guess the next option would be to stand down all operating and use all surgical beds and theatres areas, put adults in paeds areas, mix infected/non infected patients, implement mixed sex bays, use outpatient areas as temporary wards.

None of these are things that should happen. The standing up of extra capacity in some hospitals will support all hospitals in the region to manage capacity, transferring patients if necessary.

*covid isolation

We've had a 'temporary' winter pressures ward built on a car park for the last four years. It happens every winter. Store rooms get converted into patient rooms to increase bed numbers, staff get redeployed from other areas to winter pressures wards, operations get cancelled and surgical wards converted to medical wards. It's not new. Obviously covid has made it worse, but it's not new to build temporary wards in carparks. Sounds more like a scaremongering headline.

[quote namechangeddforthiss]@RoomOfRequirement it's not anywhere near as bad as it has been thats why I cant make sense of it, plus with the imminent reduction in stuff it makes 0 sense [/quote]
That's definitely not the case where I am. My local hospital has more patients now than they did previously. Not because they're all covid. But that they have covid on top of running a full service on everything else. They combined with regular winter pressures means they're struggling daily just as much if not more than last year.