News / coronavirus
Nightingale Hospital Bristol boss hopes it will not be needed
Nightingale Hospital Bristol will be able to treat its first patients with coronavirus this weekend.
But the hospital’s chief officer hopes that the facility being built at UWE’s Frenchay campus will not be needed.
Marie-Noelle Orzel, who has worked for the NHS for more than 30 years, has been seconded to Nightingale Hospital Bristol from her role as non-executive director at Avon & Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership.
is needed now More than ever
She said: “I think many of us have asked ourselves, why do we need Nightingale hospitals? I suppose, personally, I’m hoping that we may never need to use this facility.
“But what we need to be prepared for is, ‘what if’. What if we do need more intensive care beds across the Severn network? The Nightingale facility is a surge facility to provide that extra intensive care bed capacity.”
Orzel said that she is “determined that this unit will have the right staff with the right training, and that the standards we work to will be exactly the same as those delivered in any other of the hospitals” within the South West..
She added: “Our absolute vision is to deliver care with compassion, and in doing that we are looking at how we can best care for the patients, but equally importantly how we can best care for our staff.
“Clearly it’s been a challenge developing a facility like this in a relatively – or not a very short – period of time, and I’m really grateful for all the input we have had from a number of our partners. To name just a few, these include the police, the Army, the MOD at Abbey Wood, volunteers, local businesses and the local authority.
“And working with these partners, it enables me to give the assurance to our wider community that if their loved ones were ever to require a level of specialist care, we’ve built a facility that can provide this.”
All photos: NHS
Read more: New timelapse video shows Nightingale Hospital Bristol nearing completion
Our top newsletters emailed directly to you
