Sending patients to Nightingale hospitals ‘not worth the headache’

SOME medical staff were reluctant to divert Covid-19 sick to NHS Nightingales at the peak of the crisis because patients would eventually be bounced back to busy hospitals to be discharged.

Inpatients who were transferred were said to have faced extended stays because doctors at the largely unused facilities were unable to sign off patients’ return home as a result of the sites’ status as “back-up facility” for hospitals. One senior doctor suggested colleagues “did not want the headache” of knowing patients would return, but NHS bosses denied suggestions that extra admin was a factor in the nine centres remaining empty.

“The Nightingales were designed to provide back-up capacity for the NHS,” said Dr Vin Diwakar, the NHS London regional director. “The reason that Nightingales did not have to be used to their full capacity is because of the swift response and hard work of our staff and our services, and crucially because the public adhered to government advice to stay home, which limited the spread of the virus.”

London’s Nightingale Hospital, which opened on April 3 with space for 4,000 beds to treat Covid-19 patients, treated 51 patients in its first three weeks, prompting the Government to announce last Monday that it was being put on standby.

The decision came two days after

The Sunday Telegraph identified how the Government became heavily influenced by a miscalculation on hospitalised over-80s in modelling by Prof Neil Ferguson at Imperial College London.

NHS England’s national medical director, Prof Stephen Powis, insisted the

Government was “100 per cent” right to build the extra capacity.

However, Carl Heneghan, professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford, says the Nightingales were evidence that the modelling was wrong.

“If they were watching the data (instead of relying on the model), we would have been very quickly able to understand that the critical care in hospitals were able to cope because we peaked for hospital admissions by April 2,” he told The Sunday Telegraph last night. “That distraction saw us building

Nightingales when we should have been watching nursing homes.

“We should have been building the test and trace strategy and understanding these pockets of outbreaks where they were occuring. It was a distraction when we should have been much more flexible in our approach. We were seeing a one-size-fits-all strategy. They were built across the country, and not a single one of them was needed. In that obsession we lost focus, and the point is that if we keep relying on modelling, we are not looking at what’s happening now.”