Emergency hospital at NEC to be scaled down
BEDS are being removed from the giant NHS Nightingale Hospital at the NEC which never received a single coronavirus patient.
The huge site – capable of providing more than 2,000 emergency beds – is being scaled down after one health boss said the NHS had created ‘too much capacity’ in the early stages of the pandemic.
But it does not signal the end of the ability to treat patients there as NHS chiefs say “a smaller standby facility for capacity for up to 400 beds is being retained”.
A spokesman for University Hospitals Birmingham, which runs the facility, said: “We are in the process of agreeing with the NEC that a smaller standby facility is created to support the NHS until March 2021. This provides us with the necessary provisions and allows the NEC to get back to business.
“NHS Nightingale Hospital Birmingham is not closing down.”
Last month, when asked about lessons learned through the crisis, David Rosser, chief executive of University Hospitals Birmingham, said: “We can see we created too much capacity in hospital and with the Nightingale Hospital.
“But if you take that a step further and ask me would I have not done that, I would say no, that insurance policy was worth its weight in gold.
“I’m sure the public found that very reassuring that we had that obvious capacity to fall back on, and I know my teams did – the pressures of potentially having to manage patients in corridors because we had run out of beds, as other countries did, would have been a horrible situation.”
The Nightingale hospitals were hailed at the time as a flagship success in the government’s coronavirus response.
Twelve brand new hospitals were built across the UK in a matter of weeks to ensure the pandemic did not overwhelm the NHS. Prince William and Health Secretary Matt Hancock officially opened the facility at the NEC on April 16.
Construction and services giant Interserve were given the contract under emergency procurement rules to build the facility in super-fast time as the pandemic began to unfold.
The cost of the project has never been revealed but is understood to run into several million.
More than 400 employees and contractors, supported by 60 Ghurkhas from the British Army, worked more than 100,000 construction hours to create the venue, according to a press release issued by
Interserve at the time. The NEC, working within coronavirus guidelines to reopen its indoor spaces, has so far provided the hospital space for free.
It is working with partners to prepare to open up more facilities and find alternative uses for its indoor arenas and halls.
Last week NEC Group chief executive Paul Thandi said talks were under way to use the NEC arenas for filming projects.
An NEC spokesman said: “The facility has currently been placed into hibernation in common with the other Nightingale facilities across the UK.
“The NEC is continuing to support the NHS by enabling the creation of a smaller standby facility until March 2021.”
The Nightingale hospitals have come to represent the Government’s potentially problematic focus on the NHS at the expense of care homes. Moves to ramp up available spare beds in acute hospitals meant hundreds of people not deemed clinically urgent were discharged into care homes and other community settings, often without first being tested for the virus.
This is now seen as an error that could have unwittingly seeding infection among vulnerable elderly care home residents.