Manchester Central will re-open for patients.
After being asked to ‘get ready’ following a surge in Coronavirus cases across the North West, it’s been announced that Manchester’s Nightingale hospital will officially re-open next week to help the NHS manage the number of COVID-related admissions in hospitals.
Reporting on case numbers just last Friday, it was revealed that hospitals in Salford, Stockport and Bolton were at ‘maximum capacity’ – with 82% of intensive care beds across Greater Manchester currently occupied by patients. Health Secretary Matt Hancock also confirmed just last night that Greater Manchester hospital admissions were now higher than they were at the end of March, when the epidemic originally surged across the UK.
The Health Secretary said: “In Greater Manchester there have been more coronavirus infections already in October than in July, August and September combined.
“The average daily hospital admissions in Greater Manchester are now higher than they were on March 26 and there are now more Covid-19 patients in Greater Manchester hospitals than in the whole of the South West and the South East combined.”
Expected to re-open by the end of next week, Manchester Central Conference Centre will be the first Nightingale hospital in the UK to be re-opened following its closure back in June, with the space expected to monitor discharged patients, providing ‘additional rehabilitation’. The news comes following the announcement that Greater Manchester would move into a Tier 3 lockdown level at midnight tonight, with fears that hospital admissions will continue to increase as the infection rate creeps up.
Professor Jane Eddleston of the Manchester University NHS Trust confirmed the re-opening just this morning, saying: “We will be opening the Nightingale, we expect that to be towards the end of next week,
“The Nightingale will not be used as a critical care facility and neither was it in the first phase, it will be used as a facility for patients to have additional rehabilitation.”