Revealed: The cost of Wales’ Covid field hospitals
Some Welsh field hospital beds cost £166,666 per patient just in rent at the height of the Covid pandemic. Laura Clements reveals some of the extraordinary costs Wales incurred as NHS executives sought to prepare for the worst
WHEN the coronavirus pandemic struck last spring there was a scramble by Welsh councils and health boards to convert facilities into field hospitals.
Scenes of panic in northern Italy and Wuhan, where hospitals had been overrun at the start of the pandemic, left NHS bosses believing that they had to prepare back-up facilities in case their worst-case patient projections were fulfilled.
While China had built a 1,000-bed hospital in just eight days in February, with a second 1,500-bed hospital also built in a similar timeframe, Welsh councils and health boards looked for existing buildings that they could take over on a temporary basis.
Money, it seemed, was no object, with £166m spent just on initial costs to build a total of 19 field hospitals in Wales, some of which were never used.
The running costs have continued to rack up, meaning we do not yet know the final bill.
Yet there were huge differences between the financial arrangements struck around Wales.
While Hywel Dda University Health Board (UHB) paid £5m to Bluestone Holiday Resorts for its hospital, Swansea Bay UHB was able to arrange use of the Bay Studios site on a “peppercorn basis” or at no cost.
In the Vale of Glamorgan, Cwm Taf Morgannwg UHB paid just over £100,000 to use the Welsh Rugby facility at the Vale Resort, while in Bangor, it cost just a tenth of this to take over the university building.
In Cardiff, at the most high-profile of the field hospitals, Cardiff & Vale UHB said its capital building costs were £2.37m, but that the revenue costs of running what it called the Dragon’s Heart Hospital were forecast to hit £55.73m at the point it replied to our Freedom of Information Act request.
It seems that some health boards were able to secure their field hospitals – also known as Enfys [Rainbow] hospitals – on more favourable terms than others.
The field hospitals provided thousands of extra beds, many of which were never needed, and subsequently some were decommissioned and dismantled.
But as the second wave of the pandemic took hold in Wales, a number became integral in managing the record number of patients who were hospitalised with the virus.
Up to the end of March, more than 930 people had been admitted to a field hospital in Wales, freeing up over 14,500 ‘bed days’ for acute sites.
One of those was the Ysbyty Enfys Carreg Las, at the Bluestone National Park Resort in Pembrokeshire, which at one point had around 30 patients.
The resort offered up its building for an eye-watering £5m before any build costs were added on top.
The initial contract, between the resort and Hywel Dda Health Board, was agreed to last until December 31, 2020, but was subsequently extended to March 31, after which it was handed back to Bluestone.
In April 2020, Hywel Dda Health Board admitted that demonstrating “value for money” for bed costs at the Bluestone field hospital was “challenging”.
Those figures alone suggest that sum Hywel Dda paid Bluestone was equivalent to £166,666 for each of the 30 patients it housed at the resort – with building costs and patient care costs on top of that.
A report on a board meeting on April 7, 2020, held in private, referred to the health board’s contract negotiations with Bluestone and said members “noted that demonstrating value for money on a commercial arrangement is challenging when compared with the daily bed costs which are shown for the Carmarthenshire and Ceredigion model”.
Hywel Dda had asked Pembrokeshire County Council to help find a suitable premises and was able to come up with just one suggestion – Bluestone.
The report added that the health board had “received assurances” from Pembrokeshire council that this was the only option, with no other suitable properties available.
A spokesman for the council said that a number of options were considered “within the incredible short time period” including schools and leisure centres, but Bluestone was considered the “most overall advantageous scheme”.
The most prominent of the field hospitals was the Dragon’s Heart Hospital at the Principality Stadium in Cardiff, which had 2,000 beds and was the only facility of its kind to actually admit patients during the first lockdown.
It was decommissioned last autumn.
In September 2020, Health Minister Vaughan Gething announced that nine of the field hospitals would close.
The remaining 10 provided about 2,600 additional beds during the second wave which swept across Wales over Christmas and into the new year.
They were situated at:
■ Venue Cymru, Llandudno;
■ Ysbyty Enfys, Deeside;
■ Brailsford Centre, Bangor University;
■ Ysbyty’r Seren, Bridgend Industrial Estate;
■ Y Barn at Parc y Scarlets;
■ Llanelli Selwyn Samuel Centre, Llanelli;
■ Bluestone holiday village, Pembrokeshire;
■ Aberystwyth leisure centre;
■ Cardigan leisure centre; and
■ Bay Studios, Swansea.
In addition, a new £33m facility, known as the Lakeside Wing, was built at the University Hospital of Wales, which had a dedicated 400 beds for coronavirus patients.
Ysbyty’r Seren was one of the busiest, if not the busiest, field hospital in the UK, with more than 200 admissions up to March 22. It was also handed back from April 1.
The Welsh Government spokesman confirmed that nine field hospitals remain open as the second wave is nearly all but over, the majority of which are being used as Covid vaccination centres.
The spokesman added: “It is for each health board to decide how and when field hospitals are used.
“Given the prospect of further ‘waves’ of Covid-19 and uncertainty around the surge capacity required by the NHS to manage any resultant increases in demand, we have asked health boards to consider whether field hospital facilities should be maintained in 2021-22.
“In developing local plans, health boards will also consider whether existing field hospital facilities could add value – where it is prudent to do so – through delivery of other services based on local population need.”
There has been some debate about whether the money spent on field hospitals was well spent but Wales’ Health Minister Vaughan Gething and the head of the Welsh NHS, Dr Andrew Goodall, always insisted they had to prepare for their worst.
Dr Goodall told a committee of Senedd Members: “They were always there for extraordinary and exceptional use. The fact that they have had that extra flexibility in the system, which is the size of a small district general hospital, I think has helped us in our resilience.”