Vocal Voices

Well they are being quietly dismantled
According to the DM
No staff to work there im not surprised
But very angry

It was all part of the 'how to build mass hysteria" propaganda Saundra

I have been reading comments for ages from PHE, the NHS, and medical professionals; including consultants, doctors and nurses, that Nightingales in the form proposed were always a mad idea.

On the news late last night when the 'dismantling' news broke one said that they would have been better used as general post-op and recuperation units for other ailments.

I am not sure what to think.

I think they should have been left in situ despite the lack of staff, on the premise that we just don't know how far the present situation will deteriorate. At least they would be there for any overflow rather than treating patients in car parks. Recuperating patients may well be ideal for transfer to the Nightingale hospitals as presumably less numbers of staff would be necessary to care for recuperating patients, leaving bed space available in hospitals for the covid patients.

Over the last 30 or 40 years the NHS, under the guise of being made more "businesslike" and "efficient", has been stripped of beds and facilities.
NHS beds in 1989 299,000, beds in 2019 141,000.
We now have fewer beds per head of population than we did before the NHS was actually formed.
Hence victim blaming phrases like "bed blockers". We don't have enough beds, we haven't had for years.
I'd like to see some stats on how many front line nurses and doctors we have. Certainly in the old days when nurses learned on the job rather than on a degree course there would have been more manpower available in hospitals.
The Nightingales were gesture politics, a stampeded response to a shieking press. "We don't have the beds! We don't have the ventilators! Scandalous!".
No, and we didn't have the staff either.

We need massive NHS reform. Analysis of staff; how many are employed? What are they employed doing? Analysis of work done - who is ding it? Are the Trusts just replicating what one organisation could do? Are we funding the NHS correctly?

I doubt it will happen though.

The Nightingales were a knee-jerk reaction to the problem when it needed calm heads to sit down and analyse the numbers and come up with workable solutions, but what is done is done, we now need to use them as best we can.

I agree with Cromwell that how the NHS is funded and operated has to be gone over with a fine toothed comb. However, unlike him, I am hopeful that the issues thrown up by the pandemic will make the authorities think again. It has been many times more expensive to react to the emergency than to have some underused spare capacity on a regular basis.

In our own everyday lives we all have a bit of spare food in, a medicine cabinet, fuel in the tank, wardrobes of clothes. Some things cannot operate effectively on 'just in time' and the NHS is probably the biggest.