New NHS Nightingale Hospital at Manchester Central nears finish

NHS staff are working day and night to create the new NHS Nightingale Hospital North West. The temporary hospital at Manchester Central is being put in place to for patients across the North West, including Lancashire, Cheshire, Merseyside and South Cumbria as well as Greater Manchester.

They are joined by experts from the military, social care, local government, and charities at Manchester Central. Their combined efforts have created a new hospital, clinical model and recruitment programme in just ten days.

Within the next week, NHS Nightingale Hospital North West will be equipped and staffed to receive up to 750 patients from across the North West of England. A recruitment campaign launched on Saturday, and has already attracted hundreds of expressions of interest from across the North West.

NHS Nightingale Hospital North West will be staffed by consultants, junior doctors, nurses, healthcare support workers, physiotherapists, pharmacists, occupational therapists, social workers, and a huge range of non-clinical support workers and administrators.

They will look after Covid-19 patients from across the region who do not need intensive care but who still need treatment. The hospital will link closely to community health and social care services, and patients will be transferred there from the network of hospitals across the North West.

Boosting the Covid-19 response

Jackie Bird, Chief Nurse for NHS England and NHS Improvement North West, is the Senior Responsible Officer for the NHS Nightingale North West hospital. She said:

“The Nightingale programme, together with the rest of the coronavirus response, really shows what the NHS and its partners can achieve when it pulls all the stops out. It’s been very heartening to see so many people and different organisations pulling together to create an entire hospital in the space of a fortnight to care for our population. It’s an incredible feat.

“Hospitals in the region have done a great job of ramping up capacity to care for coronavirus patients, and the NHS Nightingale North West will give us additional beds should they be needed. But of course we actually want to be treating as few people as possible here, which is why we are continuing to ask people in the North West to stay home to save lives.”

The project lead for the hospital is Ian Williamson, who is also, Chief Accountable Officer of Manchester Health and Care Commissioning and will be managing how the temporary facility works with existing NHS and social care in the North West.

He said: “NHS Nightingale Hospital North West will provide the highest possible standard of care for Covid-19 patients from across the whole region, and will free up capacity in our hospitals.

"The professionalism and commitment of the people who have come together from a wide range of organisations has made it possible to build a new hospital in just a few weeks and we are all proud to be involved in helping the NHS to save lives.”