Quote Originally Posted by MadAmster View Post
Maybe, with hindsight, they should have had CV hospitals dealing exclusively with CV patients and others handling the usual day to day stuff of A&E, heart, lung, liver, brain, cancer etc treatment rather than "furlough" them in favour of CV treatments.
The issue with that from someone I know who is high up locally in the NHS was that there wasn't the trained staff available to be able to staff the hospitals. Apparently, and this is an insiders perspective not mine,, if the Nightingales had been fully used, it would have created a serious issue due to staff shortages etc.

One can't just "find" trained staff able to deal with seriously ill patients in intensive care. Never mind the fact that there NHS is 40,000 nurses short, due to the Gov ending paid training and freezing pay in previous years. Lots of staff jumped ship to the private sector.

Which raises another issue, that again according to this chap, there are multi million pound contracts with private hospitals to keep spare capacity. Now that might sound sensible, but what it is doing is delaying even private operations in general medicine and lining the pockets of private health providers for at the moment little or no work.