Councillor calls for inquiry on unused hospital

A COUNCILLOR has made calls for an inquiry into why the NHS Nightingale Hospital in Harrogate has not been used to treat coronavirus patients.

Councillor Jim Clark has asked the West Yorkshire Joint Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee to support him in his calls for a probe into why the 500-bed hospital at Harrogate Convention Centre has not been brought into action before now and whether it would have had enough NHS staff to do so.

Coun Clark, who represents the Harrogate Harlow ward, said building the £27m hospital in just a matter of weeks was a “tremendous success” but questioned “if we had needed it, could we have used it?”

“We need a public inquiry into why we have never used the Nightingale hospital,” he told the committee. “I wrote to the secretary of state in 2018 saying that we were so short of staff in the Harrogate Clinical Commissioning Group at that time that it was affecting performance. So, if we had needed the Nightingale hospital, there wouldn’t have been people there to man it.”

Coun Clark, who is also chairman of North Yorkshire County Council, also questioned why the Great Yorkshire Showground in Harrogate was chosen as a location for the town’s vaccination centre over the Nightingale.

Anthony Kealy, NHS England director, described the facility as “really valuable resource” and said it was a “success” that it has not been used to treat Covid-19 patients. He said it was developed “as an insurance policy against the NHS being overwhelmed”.