Harrogate District Hospital to increase covid tests for staff

Harrogate District Hospital is to increase the number of coronavirus tests for staff amid concerns some NHS employees are being forced to miss work to self-isolate because tests aren’t available.

NHS Providers, which represents English hospital trusts, said today there were clear capacity problems with the testing regime.

Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, said trust leaders from Bristol, Leeds and London had all raised concerns that a lack of testing availability had led to greater levels of staff absence. He added:

“The problem is that NHS trusts are working in the dark – they don’t know why these shortages are occurring, how long they are likely to last, how geographically widespread they are likely to be and what priority will be given to healthcare workers and their families in accessing scarce tests.”

A spokesman for Harrogate and District NHS Foundation Trust said it had its own staff testing facility and that any staff member required to have a test had received one. He added:

“We’re continuing to monitor demand for testing. In line with recent general increases in demand, we are in the process of extending our staff service to ensure we have capacity going forward.”

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Angels appear around Nidderdale villages

A host of angels made from many different materials has started appearing around Dacre Banks and other neighbouring parishes in Nidderdale.

Rachel Ferneley, whose husband the Rev Alistair Ferneley is the vicar of Holy Trinity Church, has inspired parishioners and local people to make the angels as a means of thanking those who have helped others during the crisis and thinking of those who have died or are ill.

As well as being on display in gardens, windows of homes and businesses, they are decorating Holy Trinity itself.

At 10am tomorrow, the people who have made them are invited to bring their creations to the church for a socially-distanced open-air service led by Rev Ferneley. A rainbow of hope made up of the different written intentions will also be at the service.

Photograph of model angels in Holy Trinity Church, Dacre Banks

Part of the Nidderdale Angels display at Holy Trinity Church in Dacre Banks.

Mrs Ferneley told the Stray Ferret:

“During the coronavirus crisis, the local community has pulled together and helped one another in many ways and I thought it would be appropriate to have a means of marking this with the Nidderdale angels.”

She added:

“This can be a way of thanking people who have acted like angels with help during the crisis, or a way of remembering loved ones who have died, or who are unwell.”

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The call for angels has sparked the imagination of the local community as the designs have come in many shapes and sizes, from the small cherub made out of chicken wire at the entrance to Holy Trinity to one made out of corks. More life-like are the two mannequins dressed in angelic clothing inside the church.

Mrs Ferneley is delighted by the response to the bank holiday event and pointed out:

“All we need now is for the angels to help us by bringing some dry weather on Sunday morning for our outdoor service!”

Proposal to close NHS dentist in Harrogate

An NHS dentist in Harrogate could close and move its patients to Starbeck if planned changes go ahead.

Chatsworth House Dental Centre, based on Kings Road, sent out letters to its patients to tell them about the plans to merge with Starbeck Dental Centre.

Under the proposals, patients would need to travel 1.7 miles to the practice on Starbeck High Street – a six-minute drive or more than 30-minute walk.

The service provider, Target Dental Group, has not formally approached the NHS with its proposal and it is unclear what the timescale is for the closure.

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In the letter to patients, the provider said the merger would create a hub of dental services and “create an even greater patient experience”.

“Starbeck Dental Centre is situated in a modern spacious building. It is able to offer a broad range of services alongside full disabled access, modern facilities and easy access via public transport.”

The Stray Ferret approached the provider for a comment but received no response by the time of publication.

How easy is it to get an NHS dentist in Harrogate?

The proposed closure of Chatsworth House Dental Centre will likely prompt fears about NHS dentist spaces in Harrogate.

Of the 11 NHS dentists in the town, only the Harrogate Dental Centre on Hookstone Park is advertising for new adult NHS patients. South Park Dental Practice is also advertising for child places up to the age of 18.

Currently, NHS dentists are not taking on any new patients because of the coronavirus pandemic. That could change by October, depending on guidance at the time.

Blow for Harrogate hospitality as major exhibition called off

A major event in the Harrogate Convention Centre calendar has been called off for January 2021.

BIGGA Turf Management Exhibition (BTME) has been taking place at the venue for more than 30 years.

However, with HCC’s future still unknown until the NHS confirms whether the Nightingale hospital is needed over winter, and with social distancing measures making the busy international event difficult, the organisers have cancelled it for the first time since 1989.

Instead, they will hold a “festival of turf” in the summer, which they hope will be outside. A spokesman for BIGGA (the British and International Golf Greenkeepers Association) said:

“The Harrogate Convention Centre, home to BTME since its inauguration as the European Turf Management Exhibition (ETME) in 1989, has been utilised as an NHS Nightingale Hospital since the peak of the outbreak in April and BIGGA is incredibly proud to be associated with a venue that has been transformed to enable the treatment of covid 19 patients, should the need arise.

“However, the alteration of dates will require a new venue to be found and discussions are underway with potential event hosts. Details will be released in due course.

“It is anticipated that BTME will return to the Harrogate Convention Centre in January 2022.”

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The news will come as a blow to the hospitality industry, which benefits from delegates staying in local hotels and guesthouses, eating out at restaurants and visiting other venues in the town. Kimberly Wilson, chair of guesthouse association Accommodation Harrogate, told the Stray Ferret:

“This is an important event for Harrogate. After December 15, Harrogate is very quiet until the Christmas and Gift Fair, which is mostly day trippers, and BIGGA is the first big show of the year.

“It’s a big deal for the town. They take a lot of beds – there are three main days and they do a lot of life-long learning around it, so some people stay for five days. It’s a longer event and they spend a lot of money in restaurants and bars.”

The organisers said they would move their education programme, Continue to Learn, online in January next year. Organisers said they expected the event to return to Harrogate Convention Centre in 2022.

However, with other events also taking place online, fears have been raised about the future of the conference industry, especially if social distancing measures remain in place for many months or even years. Ms Wilson said she was concerned about the potential long-term impact if event organisers decided not to resume in person in future.

Harrogate Convention Centre is currently in use by the NHS as a Nightingale hospital

The announcement about BIGGA follows the news that the Flooring Show is moving from its usual home at Harrogate Convention Centre in September to the Yorkshire Event Centre at the Great Yorkshire Showground in late February. Its organisers are putting on shuttle buses to help attendees get to and from the town centre.

Meanwhile, the Bridal Show has also moved from HCC to the Yorkshire Event Centre and is set for early October this year.

No announcement has been made about whether the Nightingale hospital will remain in Harrogate. The NHS’s contract to use the site expired last Friday, but a two-week extension was announced to enable negotiations to continue.

The Prime Minister has announced £3 billion of funding to enable the Nightingale hospitals around the UK to be maintained if needed. However, the one housed at Birmingham NEC has since been scaled back and the venue is preparing to host events from October 1, when covid guidelines change.

Saint Michael’s Hospice receives royal support for helpline service

A Harrogate charity which has been providing a helpline for NHS and care workers has been given a grant to extend its support to “blue light” emergency services.

Just ‘B’, one of the services offered by Saint Michael’s Hospice, has been providing support for people working on the frontline since April. The service provides bereavement, trauma and emotional wellbeing support to key workers, alongside national charity Hospice UK.

The Royal Foundation of The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge has granted nearly £1.8 million to charities to support the frontline community. The money will allow Saint Michael’s to extend its support to all emergency service workers for a further two years.

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Tony Collins, the Chief Executive of Saint Michael’s Hospice said:

“We are delighted to be able to extend this service to support our colleagues in the NHS, social care sector and emergency services. We know that they have been dealing with some of the most challenging situations imaginable.”

two ladies holding Just B signs

Just ‘B’ is made up of a team or trained and qualified volunteers and staff.

Speaking about the new grant, The Duchess of Cambridge said:

“Over recent months we have all been in awe of the incredible work that frontline staff and emergency responders have been doing in response to COVID-19, but we know that for many of them, their families, and for thousands of others across the UK, the pandemic will have a lasting impact on their mental health.”

The helpline is available to all ages and lines are open between 8am-8pm, seven days a week.

Ripon MP defends controversial NHS Trade Bill vote

Ripon and Skipton Conservative MP Julian Smith has written to the Stray Ferret defending his decision to vote in Parliament against protecting the NHS from a future trade deal with the United States.

Last week an amendment was put forward to the government’s Trade Bill to ensure the NHS principle of being “free at the point of delivery” was not compromised by any future trade deal. The amendment failed by 251 votes to 340.

Included in the amendment were attempts to protect NHS staff from having their wages or rights cut as the result of a trade deal, protections around the pricing of medicines, and stopping confidential patient data being sold off to private companies.

However, Mr Smith said that he did not believe the amendment would have been legally binding.

He said:

“I recognise the strength of feeling about the provisions in new clause 17. However, for what I believe are sensible and practical reasons, I felt it best not to support the clause.”

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Mr Smith said he does not believe any future trade agreement will lead to standards in the NHS being lowered.

He added:

“No future trade agreement will be allowed to undermine the guiding principle of the NHS:  that it is universal and free at the point of need. I welcome the government’s clear and absolute commitment that the NHS will be protected in any future trade agreement. The price the NHS pays for drugs will not be on the table and nor will the services the NHS provides.

“It is important to bear in mind that the Trade Bill is a continuity bill. The powers within the bill could not be used to implement new free trade agreements with countries such as the US.

“Instead, the bill only allows for trade agreements that we have been party to through our EU membership to be transitioned into UK law.

“My ministerial colleagues have no intention of lowering standards in transitioned trade agreements, as the very purpose of these agreements is to replicate as close as possible the effects of existing commitments in EU agreements. None of the 20 continuity agreements signed have resulted in standards being lowered.”

Harrogate and Knaresborough MP Andrew Jones also voted against the amendment. Mr Jones did not respond to the Stray Ferret when asked for comment.

 

Harrogate Nightingale cost £15m – but still no news on its future

The construction of Harrogate’s Nightingale hospital cost almost £15m, government contract figures reveal.

The Department of Health and Social Care spent £14.89m delivering the field hospital through Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust in April.

The contract was given to Dutch construction firm BAM, an existing supplier to the NHS. The Nightingale hospital in Exeter, also constructed by BAM, had a similar set-up cost of £14.7m, while Manchester came in at £10.35m under Integrated Health Projects.

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And with just four days to go until the end of the agreement between the NHS and Harrogate Convention Centre to use the site, no announcement has been made about whether the Nightingale hospital will remain.

Two weeks ago, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a further £3bn of funding for the NHS to maintain the additional hospital facilities around the UK if needed over winter. However, since then, the NHS has announced it is decommissioning two of the Nightingales, in London and Birmingham.

The NEC in Birmingham is set to reopen for events on October 1, in line with changing government guidance for the industry. However, the venue’s owners have agreed with the NHS to support a small non-Covid stand-by facility until March 2021, offering additional space for routine work in case existing hospitals have to deal with a second wave of the virus over winter.

Meanwhile, London’s ExCel centre will also reopen for events, with only a small percentage of its space set aside for equipment storage for the NHS Nightingale.

Harrogate’s Nightingale hospital takes up eight of the Harrogate Convention Centre’s halls and has not yet been used to treat any Covid patients. Instead, since early June, it has been offering CT scans to help the NHS catch up with appointments delayed through the coronavirus crisis.

At the time of publication, the NHS’s agreement with Harrogate Borough Council for use of the convention centre is set to expire on Friday, with no new contract in place.

Last month, The Stray Ferret reported on preparations being made to reopen the centre for events as soon as legislation allows. Measures being made ready including deep-cleaning, introducing one-way systems, and allowing events to use more space free of charge in order to enable social distancing.

Strayside Sunday: Our MPs should act on principle when it comes to the NHS

Strayside Sunday is our weekly political opinion column. It is written by Paul Baverstock, former Director of Communications for the Conservative Party. 

In 1942 William Beveridge identified “5 giants on the road to post-war reconstruction in the United Kingdom.”  Disease was one, and, on the 5th July 1948, the NHS became the state’s answer to it.

The NHS is a living breathing political battleground.  Blunt force rhetoric about it generates huge heat, while ideology, knowledge or nuance cast only low light.  Take the following case; the virtue-signalling phenomenon of clapping for the NHS, while failing to ensure or, at the very least, publicly confirm, the post-Brexit future of this treasured institution.

During lockdown, both Harrogate MP Andrew Jones and Ripon MP Julian Smith, together with every MP in parliament, implored us to “clap for the NHS.”  With typical political expediency, (alas) Smith and Jones embraced the NHS rainbow flag and led our constituency-based public displays of affection.  This week, both men voted against an NHS amendment (put down by Green MP Caroline Lucas and supported by the Labour Party) to the Trade Bill that, post-Brexit, will shape our international trading relationships.

The NHS amendment sought to protect the British principle of universal healthcare; it sought protections against wage cuts for NHS staff; the protection of the British medicines market from price gouging; to ensure that our confidential patient data could not be shared without our knowledge and permission.  I don’t know about you, but I have found it difficult to disagree with the NHS being protected from the avarice of Donald Trump’s America.  I challenge our district MPs to take a principled stance in relation to the NHS, rather than simply use its good name when they see a public relations opportunity at a time of crisis.

On the most important guarantor of British wellbeing, the future of the NHS, can there be a more obvious barometer of a person’s character?  In the end, holding to principle against the wishes of one’s own party machinery may well prove personally expensive.  But clapping for the NHS while voting to leave it open to profit-takers from abroad is most certainly cheap.

I know that in the age of the Cummings Tyranny, to vote against the party whip is career limiting.  And if I were in a charitable mood I would accept that the amendments above were put down by the Greens and by Labour to make political mischief; “nasty Tories won’t protect NHS,” “nasty Tories sell out NHS,” and so on.  Of course parliamentary politics is at play, yet it seems to me that the blue team isn’t playing very well.  What would it cost for Smith, Jones and colleagues to go on record, preferably in these pages, to state their views and, specifically, make plain that, even though they voted for the trade bill, they voted tactically against the opposition’s NHS ‘spoiler’ amendments in the interest of post-Brexit progress?

So much ideological tosh is talked about the NHS:  For example, the Labour Party and the British Medical Association (the doctor’s trade union) scream about the ‘privatisation’ of the NHS.  This, despite the fact that no one is charged by the NHS for visiting their GP, or for going to hospital, or for treatment.  Some services that are ‘free at the point of use’ to you and me are, in fact, provided by private companies, themselves paid directly by the NHS.  But at the last official count ,the proportion of the NHS’s overall budget paid to private healthcare providers was less than 9% and falling.

And we Tories bang on about waste and inefficiency, which does exist, but the fact of which is hardly surprising given that, since 1997, the NHS has endured 7 major structural reforms – with New Labour, the Coalition government and the Tories roughly equally culpable – and its demoralised staff don’t know whether they are coming or going.  Billions has been spent too (a good proportion of which has been in vain) on attempting to harness the power of technology to deliver better care outcomes, and to wire together a hugely fragmented healthcare delivery system, so that we can share patient information across and between care settings.

At this point I should declare an interest: The National Health Service is particularly dear to my heart; I worked in the system for several years and, for much of my adult life, have been a frequent acute customer.  In the summer of 2006, I was diagnosed with late stage 4 Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and the odds were very much against my survival.  I spent the next 3 months in hospital receiving brilliant care.  My chemotherapy worked, but a hospital acquired infection almost killed me.

14 years later, the consultant oncologist who saved my life remains a dear friend, a friendship we forged through political discourse; when I arrived at hospital that June, my time as Director of Communication for the Conservative Party was not yet in the distant past.  My doctor, a Professor at Imperial, was then and remains now, a die-hard socialist.  ‘Prof’ refuses on principle to see patients privately, even though with his skills and reputation he could have charged his way to millionairedom, had he been so minded.

Later, when I was discharged as an in-patient and returned to see him for quarterly out-patient check-ups in clinic, Prof would announce loudly “the Tory is back! Everyone remember to give him a hard time.”  Too civilised and sensible a man to subscribe to the view that he “could never be friends with a Tory,” what he meant was that I was to be kept honest in my views about the NHS. ‘Prof’ insists that the service is a humanity defining idea first and a set of healthcare delivery arrangements and economics second.  Do Messrs Smith and Jones?

That’s my Strayside Sunday.

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Why not get in touch with Paul and share your views on his column and local politics. paul@thestrayferret.co.uk

Councillors clash over free parking pledge for NHS workers

North Yorkshire councillors clashed over a proposed pledge to encourage NHS hospital trusts to keep on-site parking free for staff.

Lib Dem Cllr Geoff Webber put forward a motion today to support free parking and claimed two Conservative councillors spoiled it.

Cllr Richard Cooper, also the leader of Harrogate Borough Council, put forward an amendment that removed all references to free parking.

The amendment instead said the council “supports and encourages measures which enable their staff to travel to and from work sustainably.”

Harrogate District Hospital confirmed that parking will remain free for staff, visitor and patients. The trust said that after national reports that the government planned to scrap it.

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The Department for Health and Social Care said in response to the speculation that free parking will be in place for staff “during the pandemic.” It did not make reassurances beyond that.

Cllr Geoff Webber hit out at Cllr Richard Cooper after the meeting today. He said:

“This is a typical Richard Cooper trick designed to spoil motions from any other party and a tactic he has used frequently on Harrogate Borough Council. I am disgusted at this sort of manipulation.”

It will now go to a scrutiny committee before going back to the council for a debate and vote. The Lib Dems said the outcome is a “foregone conclusion.”

The Stray Ferret approached Cllr Richard Cooper for a comment but received no reply by the time of publication.

Strong indication Harrogate’s Nightingale will stay in place over winter

The Chief Executive of the NHS Sir Simon Stevens has given a strong indication that Harrogate’s NHS Nightingale at the Harrogate Convention Centre will stay in place for the winter.

The 500 bed Nightingale Yorkshire and Humber has yet to treat a single coronavirus patient. Its CT scans have recently started to be used for regular NHS patients.

Sir Simon Stevens appeared on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show this morning. He was asked about the use of the Nightingale hospitals in the future.  His response was the strongest indication yet that the Harrogate Nightingale will stay beyond its existing contract with Harrogate Borough Council, which owns the HCC,  that runs until the end of July.

“We are going to use them in two ways, first of all as we’re doing in Harrogate and Exeter, we want Nightingale type diagnostic care to ensure people can get tests and check ups and also we need to sustain a significant part of that capacity going into the winter, given the concerns of a resurgence of the virus.”

“We’ve seen in other countries in Australia, Spain and Germany that local lockdowns are required because coronavirus will be with us for months if not years to come.”

Harrogate convention centre lit up blue.

Harrogate Nightingale Hospital was lit up blue yesterday evening to celebrate the 72nd birthday of the NHS.

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Sir Simon has said that this virus could be “with us for months if not years”. His comments will have been closely watched by the hospitality industry in Harrogate as events at the HCC bring in millions of pounds of businesses.

The Stray Ferret previously reported that the borough council was preparing to reopen the convention centre in the autumn if the NHS did not renew its contract.