Yahoo Finance Nightingales cost £1m per patient, analysis shows, amid warnings most will not fully open due to lack of staff
Nightingale hospitals have cost the taxpayer £1m per patient with medical experts warning most of the facilities will not fully open due to lack of staff.
Only two out of the seven Nightingales, built earlier this year at a cost of £220m, have treated patients with Covid-19.
The London and Manchester facilities cared for an estimated 200 people during the first wave. This is the equivalent of about £1m per patient, according to the Sunday Times.
Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers told the paper that there are "not the hundreds or thousands of NHS staff waiting to be deployed into those hospitals".
He added: "In effect, you would have to take them from existing hospitals. Clearly what you want to do is to carry on treating patients in existing hospitals for as long as you possibly can until all of the existing capacity is used and then you flip to your insurance policy of using the Nightingales.
"But as soon as you start doing that, you will start drawing staff from existing hospitals, so the patient-to-members of staff ratio will start dropping, which will mean more pressure on quality of care."
Sir Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England, revealed that about 30,000 NHS staff are self-isolating or off work owing to Covid-19.
Last week a senior intensive care specialists warned that reopening Nightingale field hospitals during the second peak of coronavirus risks poaching staff from already overburdened hospitals.
Dr Gary Masterson, a consultant at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, said on Thursday at a Royal Society of Medicine webinar, that the Nightingale hospitals had been a good idea in principle, but added: "I think perhaps the thinking was done before we had any understanding of this disease process."
He said they were likely to be of little value because it is already hard to find the numbers of multi-disciplinary staff needed for regular hospitals.
