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Nov 2020

Last Updated: 29/11/2020

Politics

'Time to hand Harrogate Nightingale back to council'

by John Plummer

| 30 Nov, 2020

Lord Newby, the Liberal Democrats leader in the House of Lords, says the time has come to 'accept reality' and hand the hospital back to Harrogate District Council because it will never be used to treat covid patients.

One of the Harrogate district's most senior politicians has said the time has come to accept the Harrogate Nightingale hospital will never be used for covid and handed back.

Lord Newby, the Liberal Democrats leader in the House of Lords, said the NHS should let Harrogate District Council take back control of the building.

Lord Newby spoke to the Stray Ferret after receiving what he described as "non answers" to a series of questions he submitted to the government about staffing and bed capacity at the Nightingales in Harrogate, Sunderland and Manchester.

He asked how many nurses were required and was told by the Conservative peer Lord Bethell that “each Nightingale team has been developing a clinical model that can be scaled up as and when additional capacity is required in the region”.

Lord Newby said last month he doubted the Harrogate Nightingale had the staff to fully open and has now said:

"The only conclusions which one can draw are that the NHS has no firm plans to staff up the Harrogate Nightingale.

"If it were ever to be used for covid patients, it would obviously have to be staffed by existing staff now working in regional hospitals – all of which are already stretched – and cannot easily release doctors and nurses..

"I do not therefore believe that the facility in Harrogate will ever be used for covid and that the government should now accept this reality and hand the site back to the council."

'Flawed concept'

The government has described the Nightingales as "insurance policies". But with the peak of the second wave of the pandemic believed to have passed, and a vaccine on its way, the chances of them being used have receded.

Lord Newby said the concept of using the Nightingale was "flawed from the start". He added:

"The government should instead have looked at ways in which it could have freed up facilities in existing NHS facilities to allow for greater intake of covid patients, if this had been required."

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The Stray Ferret has requested interviews with the NHS about the Harrogate Nightingale, which was set up to treat covid patients in Yorkshire and the Humber, on numerous occasions but so far has not received one.

A spokesperson for the hospital said in a statement:

"The NHS Nightingale Yorkshire and the Humber is getting ready to care for patients should it be needed and has been operating a clinical imaging service since June to support local trusts in delivering diagnostic and surveillance CT scans, with more than 3,000 patients having now been seen at the clinic."

Lord Newby replied:

"'Getting ready' is very different from 'being ready'. The fact they’ve got a scanner there is irrelevant. The are plenty of other sites in Yorkshire where they could have put this."

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'Time to hand Harrogate Nightingale back to council'

'Flawed concept'

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