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??

Is there not an empty hospital ,brand new in Liverpool.all ready to be used ,but standing empty

@ChardonnaysPetDragon "In what hospital are these doctors?"

The articles I've read such as the below reference hospitals in London. I imagine the situation isn't exactly the same across the whole country which is why my point is only with reference to the Nightingale in East London where I live.

"One senior London nurse with an overview of intensive care across the capital told The Independent: “It hardly has any patients and we are totally over capacity. Staffing levels in some ICUs are unsafe and dangerous. It seems like we are screaming into a vacuum and no one can hear us. Some hospitals are drowning, we need the help now.”

And once again for the hard of reading: I am not complaining about the fact the hospital was built. I understand it is an insurance policy. As with all insurance policies worth the paper they are written on it should now be cashed in. If some hospitals in London lack PPE and other resources and the Nightingale has that equipment laying around I am simply saying the resources should be redeployed accordingly.

www.independent.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-nightingale-hospital-nhs-intensive-care-london-latest-a9465901.html

Does Germany do this?
Yes it does, and just like here, I read a commentary from a German nurse (wish I could find it now) who said f*ck off with your clapping, pay me properly instead (I paraphrase, obvs). No difference on that count.

The big difference in Germany is the capacity of private laboratories who can analyse the test results.

optical People don't understand how insurance works. Insurance only pays out when it has to.

I think it is you who misunderstand.
We pay insurance when we go on holiday. That is money we spend upfront just in case we run into difficulty. Our money is spent (by us).

The government built hospitals as their insurance, so at least they got something for their money. Usually holiday insurance is money down the drain as far as the spenders (i.e. holiday makers) are concerned.

@jasjas1973 I don’t go out and clap but I certainly understand why people do and I’m amazed that you are so despising of people expressing their gratitude for brave hard work. I have no idea why outcomes are different in different countries, but having once studied mathematical modelling of the spread of disease, long long ago, I can remember that there are multiple factors that impact how these things spread across the world.
Testing is of course important (though much more so BEFORE we limited social contact).

It’s natural to want to blame and critique but is it always constructive? Do you (for example) believe that medical staff risking their lives who may have lost family or friends and be working punishing shifts from temporary accommodation REALLY benefit from your characterisation of the people thanking them once a week as fucking stupid?

The Nightingale is a "just in case the worst happens" hospital - its ironic that people are querying its very existence and yet expected the world to stockpile PPE just in case of a world pandemic.

Everyone is (rightly) going spare because sufficient PPE isn't available right now because many countries didn't prepare properly when they saw this coming. The UK did however prepare emergency hospitals such as the Nightingale and now people are questioning that too!

Well I’m glad the nightingale is there I’m also glad it’s not being used that much.

This reminds me of my dipshit cousin in NZ who is moaning that the measures their government has taken are too strong as they e not got it bad over there 🤦‍♀️

You know when you watch what they do, not what they say. The built these enourmous hospitals, cancelled exams, told shielding people to hide for 12 weeks, put in financial support for 3 months furlough. It does make you think we arent very far into this.
My mum has had a scan to look at a growth on her ovary cancelled. In a years time we really are going to find a lot of advanced cancers that could have been treated.

5zeds: it’s not difficult to read up why Germany has fewer deaths. One reason is capacity to produce tests because they have a bigger chemical industry and manufacturing sector. We don’t. They also have a better system of health care. People there have a mix of NHS type care and insurance. We are so wedded to one model of health care, and politically bad mouth anything else, that we discard other options without understanding that they could be better. We need to re-evaluate what we have and how we fund it. Pouring more money into our existing system might not be best.

Also on a grad earnings table, degree nurses are mid division. They can earn very well. They always get jobs and they will never be unemployed! They gave decent pensions which the state mostly pays for. Other care workers earn significantly less and are just as vulnerable.

Thanks for the link, OP, but the article it like to has been posted about 20minutes ago, your post was written long before that, so your information cannot have come from that particular article.

Anyway, I see your point that it needs to be used, so you are saying it needs to be closed and the resources redistributed?

Surely it’s better to have it and not use it than need it and not have it?

@BubblesBuddy it’s not difficult to read up on any healthcare system anywhere really but you seem to be under the impression that that is the only factor influencing outcome. You can easily read up on other factors that have influenced the spread of other diseases and might impact this one.

A move away from a national health system seems a particularly strange response, but I assume you aren’t aware that private healthcare is already available in the uk???

It was in case, it is in case. No point thinking about building it AFTER the hospitals are at capacity. It’s been a great exercise, it may still be needed. I don’t know which hospitals are supposedly in need of the equipment. Our local hospital is normally running at 98% occupancy, it’s at 55% currently, there are no shortage of beds overall.

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

We simply don't have a death rate that is three times higher. The UK is not testing at the same level, so mild cases are not confirmed and included in figures. Estimates of the UK case numbers range between 1 and 5 million, so mortality 0.2-1%.

However, the UK government did choose to delay lockdown (against scientific advice) so the % of the UK population infected is much higher than in Germany.

The testing regime in Germany appears to have been the game - changer, but it's health service isn't without it's problems.

"It’s in the nursing divisions that Germany is currently the most ill-equipped for dealing with the crisis. One 50-year-old nurse who works in an intensive care unit at a university hospital in Lower Saxony says she and her colleagues were already pushed to their limits before the coronavirus struck. She asked to remain anonymous out of fear of reprisals. "The system actually doesn't have any buffers anymore, and we often exceed our capacity" Spiegel International

Our early infections also come from people coming back from Skiing trips? and from people from Asia, including places like Thailand and Singapore - both Brits visiting and business-people, students and tourists - and from older people visiting Italy and Europeans coming here. Which is why London was about two weeks ahead of the rest of Britain.

The Germans did get testing right. But no one has a reliable anti-body test, which is what we all really need.

I would also question Bubbles assertion that the German health care system is always better. When I lived there I paid a lot for health insurance, and there were lots of gleaming reception rooms and shiny hospitals. However community care and a GP system appeared largely non existent. Yet this is the care I, and many others have needed most. Community midwives, so you can leave hospital early. The specialist nurse practitioner, who worked with me to enable my mother to remain in her own home, and so on.

Nurses may also earn "mid table" but getting onto nursing degrees is very competitive, so not available to many would be students.

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.

Any figures coming out of China are best regarded as unreliable at best, given the Chinese government's track record of covering up things that make it look bad and silencing dissent. Did you see the BBC article on politicians talking nonsense about coronavirus? The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman has been claiming that the virus originated in the US.

www.bbc.com/news/video_and_audio/headlines/52299689/coronavirus-false-claims-by-politicians-debunked

There were no fires this month in my town so I've started a petition to close the fire station

Yes but we are supposed to be reaching the peak and Nightingale still is pretty much empty That’s like not using an extra fire service during the middle of bushfire season.
It’s not like “ having insurance and complaining when you don’t need it” We already have already had thousands of cases of people in normal hospital with it .The bad thing is happening.
It’s more like have two insurance policies and only claiming on one

Quite Sowo.

I would imagine it is about being prepared. You only need to look at the situation in Lombardy to see why that was necessary. As it is, hospitals throughout the UK have been entirely reorganised to accommodate the number of Covid patients requiring ICU. They are infectious so cannot be on mixed wards with patients without the virus. This has required hospitals to turn over many other parts of their hospitals that normally treat people requiring elective surgery, trauma triage and surgery, cancer treatment, paediatric inpatient wards... If this is going to go on for a long time, it might be a good idea to have all ICU Covid treatment in separate NHS Nightingale hospitals so that other hospital can provide comprehensive healthcare.

its'

Sowo - great graph!

Yes but we are supposed to be reaching the peak and Nightingale still is pretty much empty reaching the peak is not at the peak or even past the peak. ALL the survivors will still need care for some time and all the people yet to get ill will be piling in behind them.

Yes but we are supposed to be reaching the peak and Nightingale still is pretty much empty

It’s the first peak, which is occurring due to lockdown measures. We don’t know the proportion of the population who have had it yet and what is proposed after restrictions are lifted. Nightingale could be utilised then.

It's true that if the government hadn't arranged the building of this hospital the backlash would have been huge if they hadn't gone ahead.
I'm no fan of any politicians but they did this and I'm glad they did. The handling of this crisis has been hit and miss but to criticise building a new hospital isn't on my list of complaints. They must have had advice from somewhere that this was needed?