This lack of skilled staff is the reason why the Nightingale at ExCeL was doomed to fail. What they don’t have, yet, is a set of policies designed to improve the retention rate that is the main reason that 10% of nurse positions are vacant, a situation that is likely to get significantly worse following a traumatic year. Ministers have a target of 50,000 new nurses by 2023-24. Nurses, of whom there are more than 330,000, are by far the largest staff group, and a shortage of them is recognised as the biggest gap for planners to fill. The government and the NHS know they have a staffing problem. One immediate lesson is already clear: how some of the people who run our health service drastically failed to grasp the importance of the people who work in the NHS. But we will all be able to learn from this episode. The intense pressure on hospitals and their staff, and the worryingly high rate of transmission and demands of the vaccination programme, mean politicians and officials have other priorities at the moment. Parliamentary scrutiny of the Nightingales must come at some point. In all, about £532m was spent for remarkably little gain. But Nightingales in Birmingham and Sunderland treated no one at all. Bristol and Harrogate have provided an overflow service for other patients and services. Manchester’s treated about 100 people with Covid Exeter’s had 29 patients this month. But while the Nightingales may have sent a “message of hope”, as Prince Charles said when he opened the first one, the overall scheme was a costly mistake. Six other pop-up centres were meant to alleviate pressures around England as hospitalisations for Covid-19 cases rose rapidly. Morale was “amazing”, reported one nurse, who was brushing up on her knowledge of ventilators via e-learning modules in a nearby hotel. This was Britain’s first “coronavirus field hospital”, with space for 4,000 patients, put together in nine days. “U p to 200 soldiers a day have been working alongside NHS and civilian contractors,” ran the breathless commentary as the Nightingale hospital at the ExCeL centre in London prepared to open last April.
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