Covid-19: Response

Lord Ribeiro Excerpts

Monday 27th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell [V]]

My Lords, it is a horrible truth that this disease hits hardest those with vulnerabilities. We have put in place a massive national programme to seek to protect the most vulnerable, and those with disabilities have been very much the focus of our attention. I cannot make the commitments that I know the noble Baroness wants me to make, but I reassure her that those with disabilities are the focus of what we are trying to do.

[Lord Ribeiro (Con) [V]]

My Lords, the London Nightingale hospital was mothballed in mid-May and remains at standby for a second wave of Covid-19, having treated just 54 patients since it opened on 3 April. In a recent report of 19 July, Harrogate Borough Council questioned how the 500-bed field hospital based in Harrogate Convention Centre would be deployed. Given that £3 billion has been allocated to maintain the seven Nightingale hospitals until the end of March 2021, and noting that the Harrogate centre has not treated a single patient since it opened, can my noble friend the Minister say what the strategy is for those hospitals? Should they not be designated Covid centres to which all local hospitals can refer their patients, thereby allowing the NHS to resume its routine work and centres such as the London Nightingale hospital, which could reopen in six days with 250 beds, to provide assisted ventilation, hemofiltration and dialysis to support seriously ill Covid patients?

[Lord Bethell [V]]

My Lords, the Nightingale hospitals have been a huge success in helping us to protect the NHS at a time when our needs were greatest. Since then, when prevalence rates were lower, we reallocated resource into restarting the NHS to gain ground during the summer months on our backlog of business-as-usual work. Those resources are needed in the hospitals where people usually work. The mothballing of the Nightingale hospitals allows us to use that capacity for what is most needed right now.