If Nightingale hospitals are forced into service, will the NHS collapse under the strain?
Simon Stevens: He’s in charge of the NHS but the Tories have never given him the money to run it properly. Now that lack of funding may trigger its collapse.
Who do you think is more horrified that the so-called Nightingale hospitals might actually have to be pressed into service? The Tory government or NHS bosses who simply don’t have the resources to staff, let alone equip them?
Nightingales across the country currently stand empty, despite the fact that the number of Covid-19 cases in the UK has skyrocketed beyond the height of the virus’s first wave.
Apparently the NHS has been told to prepare the Nightingales for us in the next few weeks, but problems are likely:
How will they staff them? Last time round, the little use that was made of them was through pulling NHS staff from their usual hospitals. This did not, of course, help the patients. https://t.co/ml7XpASEWh
— DevraWiz 💙 Wear a mask (@DevraWiz) December 25, 2020
According to Metro,
Despite this huge surge in patients, the majority of the seven emergency Nightingale hospitals lay empty and have not yet started treating people with coronavirus in the second wave.
The facilities cost the Government a total of £220 million to build, but the Telegraph reports they have been left mostly empty as there are not enough staff to run them.
Only the Exeter Nightingale Hospital has been used since mid-November.
Some NHS trusts have however reportedly been told to ‘begin planning’ for the use of Nightingale hospitals.
Dr Nick Scriven, immediate past president of the Society for Acute Medicine, said this was ‘extremely worrying’ and said ‘systems will again be stretched to the limit’.
They really were an expensive waste of money, weren’t they?
Built just for show – to reassure people that Boris Johnson’s Tories were doing something positive about Covid-19 back in the spring, when they really weren’t.
Now the Tories are facing the possibility of having to press them into service after all.
The finding of Operation Cygnus – the Tories’ own test-run to see how the UK would fare in a pandemic situation – was that the NHS would collapse under the strain.
That must be weighing heavily on a lot of minds right now.
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Your photo caption is mistakenly kind to Stevens. He is part of the problem. It’s not simply about funding and privatisation, although they are battles to be fought. Stevens, aided by McKinsey, has remodelled the NHS to make it suit the inevitable (unless we stop it) insurance-based system as run by his former employer United Health of Minneapolis. The current problem is that health insurance companies and private medicine can’t make huge profit out of emergency health care like they can with cataracts. Stevens and Hunt are responsible for the 100,000 missing staff and the 17000 closed hospital beds, the alienation of junior doctors, the exodus of GPs, the failure to train and recruit in sufficient numbers, the end of many local hospitals and walk-in centres. So an already battered NHS is stretched beyond reason by a course set over years and viciously pursued by Handcock and Johnson.
Don’t worry peasants Dick Johnson’s magical 50,000 nurses will appear to staff the showcase nightingale fake hospitals!
Even better fascist dictator dick johnson will blame us peasants for contracting the coronavirus and ensuring there aren’t sufficient disposable nurses to treat us! After all little england has left the EU which means nurses from the EU can no longer enter our little fascist state!
Trouble is they sacked so so many doctors and
nurses from the NHS that many went to work in
Those very dubious companies working has highly trained Hcp
The Tory scum has no one to blame apart from themselves they have underfunded the health service, run down the national stockpile they left what 50,000 posts unfilled in the NHS and now they need them well they are responsible.
They can find the staff if they want these BS hospitals open..