Face of Nation International : Britain’s first coronavirus field hospital will treat up to 4,000 previously fit and healthy people struck down by Covid-19 once it opens, with sicker patients who are more likely to die being cared for in normal NHS hospitals. London patients in need of intensive care but with the best chance of survival will be taken to the Nightingale hospital, which has been constructed within the ExCel arena in the capital’s Docklands area in the space of a week.
Anyone with a serious underlying health condition – such as a heart, kidney or vascular problem – will go to one of the city’s district general or teaching hospitals.
The triage system means that the ExCel will take mainly younger patients – and potentially admit few older patients than those in their mid-50s – with NHS hospitals concentrating on older, sicker people.
Birmingham Nightingale hospital, being created in the city’s National Exhibition Centre, will care for non-serious, non-Covid-19 hospital patients and will be staffed mainly by GPs, it is understood. The centre will start with up to 500 beds, with the potential to grow to 2,000, and is designed to take the pressure off the West Midlands, which has emerged as the second-biggest coronavirus hotspot after London. Other field hospitals are being created at the Manchester Central Conference Centre and potentially at the Scottish exhibition centre in Glasgow.
The decision to medically profile patients at the first emergency coronavirus hospitals followed days of behind-the-scenes wrangling between senior doctors and NHS planners in preparation for a “tsunami” of coronavirus cases.
It comes as one in four NHS doctors were revealed to have been signed off from work because they were sick or in self-isolation. Prof Andrew Goddard, president of the Royal College of Physicians, told PA News that about 25% of doctors are not available. The ExCel centre is expected to start receiving patients very soon, most likely by Wednesday. (Source : The Guardian News – UK)
