Not that it'll be a surprise to anyone, but with regard to the Nightingale hospitals fiasco, we've heard from staff we know that hospitals have actively avoided referring patients to them because they have to provide their own care team to accompany them.

Which means sending a whole team to look after one patient in another facility, rather than keeping them in their own wards where they can care for multiple patients. It's an absolute joke.

They were a PR stunt that were essentially set up to fail, because no hospital is going to refer a patient under those conditions.

And we'd say the DoH must have known that, but they've proven pretty conclusively over the last decade or so that they have absolutely no understanding of how healthcare works anyway, so it could well be genuine incompetence.

The only effect the Nightingales have had is to create additional bedspace that was a logistical nightmare to use, so no one did.

You can fill a warehouse with as many beds as you like, but a *hospital* is generally defined by the specialists that work there, not the walls and ceilings.

Like, there are loads of beds and buildings in the world. That's not the problem when the NHS talks about not having beds, or not having ward capacity or whatever. "Beds" is shorthand for all the care you get while you're lying on it.

Tories wandering around a branch of DFS pointing out all the beds on display. "Look...there are loads of beds...what's the NHS complaining about?"

Tories turning up to a hospital with some futons and sleeping bags. "Just whack these in the car park, lads. Problem solved!"

And we really can't emphasise enough that the way the Nightingales are supposed to function involves hospitals basically seconding their staff away and therefore endangering the safety of the other patients under their care. They're *actively harmful*.

It's just simple arithmetic. Someone in our replies mentioned 90 staff for every 10 patients - that sounds about right, but we don't know the exact numbers. Those 90 staff are distributed around various wards and clinics. Some will be specialists.

Imagine you have a radiographer, to x-ray a COVID patient's lungs. That radiographer might also have a daily clinic with dozens of patients from numerous specialties, who all get brought down to see them.

If a patient gets referred to a Nightingale, the referring hospital needs to provide a radiographer as part of the clinical team sent with them. That means that radiographer can only care for that patient, rather than the dozens they normally would.

This might not be totally accurate, and there are doubtless workarounds - a single specialist might be sent to handle all of a given hospital's referrals, for instance - but you can see why a hospital might be reluctant to deal with the logistics of this.

Even if the specialist attends the Nightingale only as required, that's still taking them out of their clinic for travel, orientation, setting up, etc. It's a waste of a resource.

It's taking a stretched service and stretching it still further which is bad enough, but then they have the gall to pretend it's to help *ease* demand!