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??

Good grief

So the nightingales wont take anyone with a frailty score > 5. Very few people with those scores are told to go to hospital.

It's not taken very long to go from 'body positivity' to 'leave the fat ones to die'😳

To be fair our local general hospital (large northern city) has nearly 700 free beds at present (unheard of in normal times) and only 80 people needing ICU level care. We wouldn't be using the regional Nightingale even if we could send patients there. Hospital is eerily quiet

I think Nightingale hospitals will be used when the lockdown is lifted. I am surprised that people treat "the peak" as some type of a natural phenomenon similar to a storm - i.e. once it's over, it's over. Surely it depends on the restrictions in place, what looks like a peak during the lockdown will pale in comparison to the "free flow" peak.

Yes, locally they are projecting the hospitals will start to fill out around June.

The current lockdown was to buy time to ramp up hospital capacity, ventilator production, staffing etc. Once we get to a partial lift then there will be a steady stream of new cases. The aim has always been to flatten the curve below the capacity of the NHS to provide care. Now that NHS capacity has been increased they can allow more people to get sick

I don’t understand why they don’t move nice patients across to the nightingale and then make the other London’s hospitals after for cancer surgery?

How do you choose which are the nice patients?

Nightingale Hospitals are for stable patients.

They and the supersized mortuaries are insurance policies IF things get as horrific as some of the scenes we saw in Spain and Italy.

Hoping for the best and preparing for the worst is far better than remaining unprepared.

When lockdown is lifted, even partially, the second wave of infections could overwhelm existing resources.

The entire point of lockdown was to buy some time so that hospitals could ramp up capacity. You’d not expect the capacity to all be needed right now.

And frankly if it’s never needed, that’s a good thing.

Nightingale Hospitals are for stable patients

The Nightingales are set up differently in different parts of the country

Our regional one is set up to take the most unwell patients needing critical care. When they are stable they will be sent back to the general hospital within 24 hours

In other Nightingales it is the other way round, where the person is sent from the general hospital to the Nightingale as a step down once stable

My next-door neighbour who is over 70 and has lung problems had a GP home visit two days ago from the GP in an ambulance. He decided he needed to be seen at the local QE2 Hospital Woolwich. He's ok and just stayed there overnight. He said it was deathly quiet with just him and one other on a non-COVID ward and nobody in A&E. FWIW

I had paramedics out yesterday and they said the hospital is steady but mostly Covid19 patients, this is a small town hospital west Mids