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Originally Posted by mrmistoffelees
The nightingales are going to be staffed via reservists and military nursing personnel from northern hospitals. The hospitals will act in a step down capacity.
Quite simply there’s not enough nurses or specialist icu nurses to use the nightingales as the primary care facility for COVID sufferers. Whose fault that is, is something that’s up for debate. Some will blame the government (present or past) some the NHS. I think the truth is somewhere between the two.
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How is there any fault? To fully staff the nightingales with fully qualified medical staff would require them to have commenced training years ago and would have represented a commitment to grossly over staffing the NHS for no justifiable reason. You can’t just keep those numbers of people sitting around, not least because they need to continue to practice to maintain skills.
These facilities were built for crisis management purposes. If things get so bad that they’re full, that’s when they start moving staff around to match skills and requirements as best they can. And once they’ve done that we get into civil contingencies territory. We trained 2 million to fight in uniform in the last world war; if need be we can operate a civilian enlistment programme to fill basic hospital functions, or else train existing uniformed civilians (fire, police) and use the army to provide policing and fire/rescue service. It won’t be pretty but that’s what civil contingencies are about, and you can bet all these ideas and more have been thoroughly considered in Whitehall. The draft legislation to enable whatever is the preferred solution will already have been written.