It’s our Battle of the Somme
Army helps build giant virus hospital
SOLDIERS helping to build the Nightingale hospital in London last night compared the coronavirus crisis to the Battle of the Somme.
Colonel Ashleigh Boreham, who has carried out two tours of Iraq and one of Afghanistan, said it was the biggest mission of his career.
As commanding officer of 256 City of London Field Hospital, he is in charge of military personnel working on the NHS facility at the ExCeL centre.
Built in around ten days, it will have 4,000 beds for coronavirus patients when it opens this week. Similar hospitals are being installed in Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow to ease pressure on existing sites.
Colonel Boreham, who has helped create field hospitals around the world, said: ‘We are building a hospital for people in our nation. You are saving people’s lives and they could be the lives of your families. It’s the biggest job I’ve ever done.
‘My grandfather was at the Somme, this is no different. I’m just at a different battle.
‘We are doing this to save the lives of Londoners. These are our comrades, there’s no difference. It doesn’t matter if they are civilian or military.’
He said the NHS, which is leading the project, and the military had ‘one single purpose, one single aim to save lives’.
Colonel Boreham, who joined the Army in 1992, is due to retire in a few weeks and take up a job at an NHS clinical commissioning group. The 54-year-old father of two said his wife was a frontline NHS worker and his daughter was volunteering to distribute food during the crisis.
Up to 200 soldiers a day have been helping in the construction of the Docklands hospital.
They are carrying out medical planning, logistics, engineering and tasks such as building beds, laying floors, and carrying out Sergeant electrics Mark and Anderson, plumbing. 32, 1st Battalion, the Royal Anglian Regiment, is also on the project. He said: ‘It’s a new experience. It is an invisible enemy and we all need to work together to combat the outbreak. Everyone has been working flat out to the best of their ability to get this place up and running in the quickest possible time.’ More than 16,000 members of staff could be needed to run the temporary hospital if it reaches its near 4,000-bed capacity. It will be split into more than 80 wards containing 42 beds each.
The facility will be used to treat Covid-19 patients transferred from intensive care units across London.
It was reported last night that Boris Johnson’s photographer Andrew Parsons came down with coronavirus symptoms days after visiting the Nightingale hospital.
Mr Parsons photographed Mr Johnson outside Downing Street on March 26 as the country clapped for NHS workers.
The next day, the PM announced he had tested positive. Mr Parsons is self-isolating, The Sun reported.
It emerged yesterday that an ice rink in Milton Keynes will be turned into an emergency mortuary within days.