What is the point of the Nightingale hospital

[Eastie77]

Reading this evening (Guardian, Independent) that the Nightingale hospital in East London has just 30 patients. Doctors and nurses working in over-stretched hospitals are saying the facility is failing to take any seriously ill patients and they cannot access vital pieces of medical equipment including ventilators and PPE which have been earmarked for the Nightingale but are sitting around unused

A lot of senior clinicians seem to think the whole project has been a pointless political exercise and I can see their point of view.
Since the Chief Medical Officer has said today we are 'probably' reaching our peak and the Nightingale is virtually empty doesn't it make sense to just close it and redeploy all of that vital equipment??

Article with a surgeon in the Times said they can't do keyhole surgery due to the gases, only open and it is like war time, e.g. just giving a colostomy to save life. Worried me, but in my case can only have emergency / open anyway. Not good for other surgeries though.

Agree with what others have said about an insurance policy. The government can't win. Don't build a new hospital just in case and you've got the hysterics yelling about how they don't care and are personally responsible for murdering their granny. Build a new hospital which isn't used and they're wasting money, irresponsible, and personally responsible for murdering their granny.

I don't believe politicians have all the answers - far from it. But the medical advisors, civil servants and people who head up the NHS do. They are the ones taking the real decisions.

The Nightingales are only just opening. Like everything else, it takes time to get staff, resources and patients into place. You can't just switch it on overnight, especially as it's only just been put together. There are bound to be missing/faulty resources that need to be sorted before you can fill it. How about we revisit it in a few weeks' time - I suspect it'll be pretty full by then.

We’re not through it yet, let’s see what happens when restrictions are lifted.

I thought they were just for people with the virus who could be moved out of normal hospitals to enable medical treatment to resume for people who need cancer and other problems scanned and treated. It was reported yesterday large numbers of people are now dying because they cannot get proper treatment

@eeehbyegum I’ve been watching China’s figures which obviously aren’t reporting this second wave. Have you seen some information with true figures you could share with us please?

@user1497207191

Fair enough but then don't insult our intelligence by telling us, to great fanfare, that the UK opens a 4000 bed hospital in 2 weeks & our great british bulldog spirit did better than the Chinese!!!

Though were all the nurses, doctors, radiographers, pharmacists, porters plus the myride of equipment etc etc is going to come from for all the other NG hospitals, is anyone's guess.

We can't even test care workers and care home patients.

I thought I had read that the purpose of the NHS Nightingales was to take recovering patients who no longer needed to be in ICU / on ventilation.

And I think it would have been a huge endorsement of the NHS Nightingales if BoJo had been moved there for his recovery.

We should be pleased it's empty, but glad that we have the capacity if that changes. Lots of people are keen to complain once they have the benefit of hindsight. Much harder to get something right when even the best science can't tell you how a situation will unfold.

Boris Johnson can say he fulfilled his claim of building hospitals while in power ha! Seriously though I agree with some of the other posts it’s an insurance policy and we’re not “out of the woods” yet so best to look at this when we are.

I'd rather there be a few nightingale hospitals than not. When this is over those buildings can be put back to their original use. It's a safety net for us all. As others have said it's like an insurance policy.

@Comefromaway

Wasn’t the Nightingale always designed to take the less seriously ill patients to free up beds fir the critically ill in the normal hospitals?
The Nightingale in London was intended to take cases where patients were already intubated/on ventilators if other hospitals became overwhelmed.

The Nightingale at the NEC was intended to take recovering patients if other hospitals were overwhelmed.

As previous posters have said, these hospitals are insurance policies in case we need them. There are not shortages of equipment in these new temporary hospitals. Other NHS hospitals have spare capacity because many wards have been closed and routine surgery and treatments have been cancelled.

My ndn, a nurse, is on annual leave this week (applied for last week) as she doesn't have a role at present. She hasn't been at work for over two weeks. Her ward, along with many others in the hospital she works in, has been closed. She tells me there are loads of nurses in her position. She said many of her colleagues have phoned in saying they are 'self-isolating' because they don't want to be redeployed elsewhere because they are frightened for themselves and their families.
My ndn doesn't want to go back to work as she doesn't know where she will work.

It is good news that the Nightingale hospitals have hardly been needed so far but great that they are there if they are needed.

I know a retired go who was automatically reregistered around the 10th of March, they made contact to inform they would be in contact and hadn’t forgotten them / this was 3 weeks ago

So they are keeping doctors and hospitals ready, better than not having sorted anything and people lying on floors.

‘‘Tis at least something this government have got right and I’m horrified at much they haven’t done

why the UK death rate is 13% per 100 patients in care and in Germany 2.5% per 100.
So with unused 4000 extra beds in London, why aren't patients getting the early treatment which German patients get?

^ exactly this. We have capacity because the NHS is not treating people - neither Covid nor non covid - it’s scandalous. I’m sure half the country will still be out tonight doing their performing seal act.

Because Germans are admitting people who aren’t as ill?
Or Germans who are ill are stronger?

Or their treatment in hospital is better than ours?

Are you suggesting that the medical staff in uk hospitals, some of whom are dying while treating us, don’t deserve our thanks and support?

If it haven’t been built and the hospitals had to start turning people away then you would be moaning. I think it’s great that it’s there just incase there’s a huge increase of patients, there still may be, we could also have a 2nd wave when we come out of lockdown. Just because we have possibly reached the peak this virus is still out there and may be for some time. Best to be prepared rather than the alternative.

@Orangeblossom78
Do you have a link and share token to the article please? The surgeon didn’t tell me this when I spoke to him a few weeks ago. I’m not sure if I will have keyhole or open - this is up for discussion as I don’t know what is best this time. Open failed. Then a keyhole repair failed. But if I have open, that will mean with my other surgeries, I will have an incision running from just past the bottom of my breastbone to my pubic bone. Even if I don’t, I imagine I will still have 3 Lots of 2 inch plus holes... to accompany the other incisions in my side...

Medical staff may well do, ‘the NHS’ is an organisation which is not performing well. If the only way it can be saved is by not doing it’s job i.e. treating people when they need treatment then what’s its point?

I am far more worried about a loved one not getting an early diagnosis for cancer or proper treatment for sepsis or not having access to a stroke centre for example than I am of any of us dying from covid.

Fetishising a system is bizarre & trying to get people to stop talking about its failures by attempts at emotional blackmail is pathetic.

@5zeds

With a death rate 3x higher than Germany's, going out and clapping is fucking stupid.
Does Germany do this?

how about supporting the NHS by demanding our Govt ramp up testing, instead of that loon Hancock suggesting that the reason tests are low is because "People are not coming forward"

So many people wouldn't be dying if they had proper PPE, testing, tracing and early intervention.

a pointless political exercise

That's the problem of not having a working TARDIS.

If they had been needed and not built I bet the same people would be criticising that decision.

Laniakea, figures cannot be directly comparable, and all Governments are flying pretty blind. This virus is so unknown. Germany seems to have mainly picked up the infection from people returning from ski holidays, so by definition younger and fitter. (A ski resort in Austria seems to have been the source of the some of the early infections.) They then clamped down quickly in part because they, and German giants such as Bayer had been quick off the mark in producing test equipment.

It appears that both Northern Italy and the UK were caught out by the extent to which the virus had been circulating within the general population. The Chinese figures have proved very different to the experience in Europe and the US, and so circulation within an older population has been much more widespread.

My mother passed away in the autumn aged 90 after living with dementia for 10 years. Up to then she had physically been very healthy, but both I, and I assume her doctors, would have been very cautious about having her admitted to hospital and undergoing invasive treatment. With previous hospital admissions, I had paid for either convalescent care in a nursing home, or 24 hour short term care at home, in order to get her out of hospital as soon as possible, and back into her routine. Hospitals are frightening places for the confused elderly. For many over 85s, though not all, a single major event, whether it be a fall or coronavirus, will prove fatal. (In my mother's case it was an unexpected blockage in an aorta, so unexpected and instant.) Our assumption had been that she would have spent 3 years bedridden with end stage dementia. Almost anything else seemed preferable.

I thought it was for people recovering.

People don't understand how insurance works. Insurance only pays out when it has to. It doesn't build anything or use any funds 'just in case'. There is no financial liability unless the EVENT ACTUALLY HAPPENS.

This hospital has been built. Millions will have been spent. If it's not used, that's a complete waste of funds - funds that could have been used to support existing hospitals in the buying of ventilators and PPE.

They then clamped down quickly in part because they, and German giants such as Bayer had been quick off the mark in producing test equipment

Our early infections also come from people coming back from Skiing trips?
Bayer and Roche were told by the German Govt to produce testing equipment, we didn't order our Pharma Ind to do the same, despite Hancock boasting we had invented the test!!!
By far more testing, tracing and early intervention, Germany has saved many more times the lives our country has, will come out of lockdown early, saving its economy and preventing the lives we will lose thanks to poverty.

The reason we are heading for one of the worlds worst death rates is because we did not take this virus seriously or rather Johnson didn't.

This failure is down to him and his pathetic "exceptionalism"

Seems we're halfway there on MN