Inside UK’s f irst 4,000-bed mega-hospital as exhibition centre turns into NHS Nightingale
CUBICLES that will soon contain 4,000 hospital beds for desperately ill patients battling coronavirus stretch far into the distance.
This is NHS Nightingale, a vast hospital being built at astonishing speed at the ExCel Centre in East London to help Britain’s stretched National Health Service cope with a tsunami of Covid-19 cases.
These extraordinary i mages, released by Downing Street, show how the UK is emulating China’s response to the pandemic by rapidly building new field hospitals.
Soldiers and contractors are working to ensure the hospital can receive its first patients this week. It will initially open with 500 beds before expanding to 4,000 in two huge wards.
A blueprint seen by The Mail on Sunday shows intensive care wards, isolation areas and recovery zones, all separated by partitioned walls.
Two different areas are reserved for the most gravely ill patients who require ventilators. A large mortuary is being built at one end of the 107,000sq ft hospital.
The site will be run by a ‘hospital management cell’ located in the ExCel Centre’s central corridor, which will separate the wards. The hospital will have both civilian and military medical staff, who will live on-site in temporary accommodation, and be led by retired nurse Deidre Barr, 62, from Northern Ireland.
She is coming out of retirement to be the director of operations.
Further temporary field hospitals will be built in Manchester, Birmingham, Cardiff and Scotland.
A temporary mortuary site for up to 1,600 bodies has been installed at Breakspear Crematorium in Ruislip, North-West London.
It is the first of several facilities to be built in the capital as a precautionary measure should hospitals experience capacity issues.