Nightingales

[Bouncycastle12]

Why is there so much emphasis on hospitals filling up but nothing about shifting people to the Nightingale hospitals? Are they all mothballed? What was the point in them?

Oh, but hang on, maybe staff would move if they had a shiny badge .

The trusts sending patients to the Nightingale and Seacole were told they’d have to send the staff too. They are/were a vanity project rather than anything useful.
We were asked to second staff with current clinical registration or where people with clinical qualifications could reregister quickly and had people on standby but they weren’t needed as too few patients. A few did induction, had their scrubs provided and disappeared off but then came back again about a week later.

They are not equipped for very much at all. They are not staffed. People now being treated more aggressively at an earlier stage using NIV rather than being incubated, as more effective, lower risk and cheaper. We may yet need to use the pile up the ventilators with minimal support places but hopefully not.

at idle nurses

Oh, but hang on, maybe staff would move if they had a shiny badge.

But don’t forget the importance of the wonderful clap they will receive as they board their coach, waving goodbye to their tearful children, before they are whisked away to some secret location...

The Glasgow Nightingale is being used for outpatient clinics and imaging as it has been difficult to get back to pre Covid numbers with social distancing in departments and waiting areas. I don’t think this is a bad idea to keep things going.

Intubated not incubated.
Each ITU bed needs a minimum of four nurses to staff it with 60% of staff having postgraduate ITU qualifications. There needs to be an intensivist or anaesthetic consultant on site at all times.

There are just under 4,000 ITU beds in U.K. plus about 150 in independent hospitals. A not insignificant number of those are specialists units. That means lots of staff.

Part of the role of Nightingales was/is to become temporary morgues

@dementedma

Part of the role of Nightingales was/is to become temporary morgues

Not exactly. They do have large mortuary facilities, but then most district general hospitals have contingency plans for very large mortuaries. They weren’t built as mortuaries but with acknowledgement that many people needing ventilation would die.

@Lucked

The Glasgow Nightingale is being used for outpatient clinics and imaging as it has been difficult to get back to pre Covid numbers with social distancing in departments and waiting areas. I don’t think this is a bad idea to keep things going.

@Lucked I’m in Glasgow and didn’t know that. That’s really good, actually, glad it’s not sitting gathering dust.

The NHS runs the Operational Pressures Escalation Levels (OPEL) system to track pressures in different trusts. The levels are 1-4, 4 being the worst, the point at which trusts are 'unable to deliver comprehensive care.' In the winter of 2017-18 Cheshire and Merseyside issued 32 OPEL 4 alerts (some of these would have lasted only a few hours). Over the last 10 years it's become more and more common for the NHS not to be able to cope with demand, especially in winter. The fact that people are acting like this is a new thing shows how much ignorance there is about how the NHS has been crippled and mismanaged. I notice that this week NHS staff are saying more and more that they can cope with winter pressures - I think for a while there was a combination of genuine fear and fatigue fuelling a narrative that everything was going to fall apart, but now that the initial feeling of crisis is over many just want to get on with things and are tired of the constant anticipation of doom. They are far more confident in their ability to cope - unfortunately that's because winter is always shit and they always get through somehow. It's not how it should be but hey ho.

Idle nurse here! There are 85,000 NHS vacancies nationally, as well as an issue recruiting enough people to train to be nurses on the first place. I’m
in the southwest- the hospitals where I work are not busy with covid yet but are very busy trying to catch up with all the stuff that was delayed from lockdown, which I am sure is the case for every hospital up and down the country. There are really no staff for the Nightingales- if you staff them you’re not staffing something else basically.

@Bouncycastle12

But if they don’t have the staff, what was the point in building them?

To look like the government was doing something even though it was pointless.

Someone didn't think through further than that.

www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/hospital-scandal-exposed-hundreds-covid-30827249

Is part of the problem maybe that most of the people who are hospitalised with covid have other complex health issues that would be difficult to manage away from the main hospital?

@978q My eye-roll emoji is broken so take this middle finger instead! F*@$ Y#%!

You certainly do contain nuts, lots of them, an apologist of the very worst sort , get a life, doubtful though.

They don't have enough toilets in them, and no washing facilities at all. Or cooking.

On account of being fake hospitals that were never intended to be used.

They didn't even have ambulance bays.