Councillor calls for inquiry into why Harrogate's NHS Nightingale hospital has not been used

Councillor Jim Clark has asked the West Yorkshire Joint Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee to support him in his calls for a probe into why the 500-bed hospital at Harrogate Convention Centre has not been brought into action before now and whether it would have had enough NHS staff to do so.

Councillor Clark, who represents the Harrogate Harlow ward, said building the £27million hospital in just a matter of weeks was a "tremendous success" but questioned "if we had needed it, could we have used it?"

"We need a public inquiry into why we have never used the Nightingale hospital," he told the committee yesterday.

"I wrote to the secretary of state in 2018 saying that we were so short of staff in the Harrogate Clinical Commissioning Group at that time that it was affecting performance. So, if we had needed the Nightingale hospital, there wouldn't have been people there to man it."

Councillor Clark, who is also chairman of North Yorkshire County Council, also questioned why the Great Yorkshire Showground in Harrogate was chosen as a location for the town's vaccination centre over the Nightingale.

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The temporary hospital was opened by Captain Sir Tom Moore ten months ago and a contract for its use is due to expire on 31 March. It has not treated a single coronavirus patient but has been used to carry out non-coronavirus diagnostic tests and outpatient appointments.

Anthony Kealy, NHS England director in West Yorkshire, described the facility as "really valuable resource" and said it was a "success" that it has not been used to treat Covid-19 patients.

He told the committee: "It was developed as an insurance policy against the NHS being overwhelmed and the Nightingale programme was being rolled out rapidly at the point where we were looking at northern Italy and its health services being overwhelmed.

"If the NHS had got to that point in April, the Nightingale would have certainly opened but we managed to avoid that."

Leading figures in healthcare professions have previously voiced concerns that the UK's seven Nightingale hospitals would not be able to operate fully due to a lack of staff but officials behind the Harrogate facility have continually insisted it would have been able to open if needed.

Mr Kealy added: "If we had needed to open it, it would have been on the basis of staff being brought in from our existing hospitals but, of course, staff aren't sitting around waiting to be deployed.

"It would have been a case of staffing the Nightingale at the expense of other routine things going on in existing hospitals and we are very pleased that we never had to do that.

"It's an indication that the NHS was able to cope with the degree of demand that we faced."

A decision on whether to pursue a public inquiry will be taken by the West Yorkshire Joint Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee next month.

By Jacob Webster, Local Democracy Reporter