Even experienced estates and facilities professionals would have found a three-week timescale to create, construct, and fully fit out a surge hub in a hospital car park a pretty daunting prospect. However, as HEJ’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, discovered from five senior team members involved in just such a project at a Lancashire acute Trust earlier this year, a resolve and determination to meet this extremely tight deadline, and excellent collaboration from all involved, saw the facility operational and ready to admit patients right on cue.
Last December, as a rise in cases of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 continued to put pressure on hospitals UK-wide, NHSE/I announced that eight NHS Nightingale surge hubs would be built at major hospitals throughout England – the Royal Preston Hospital, the Lister Hospital in Stevenage, St James’s Hospital in Leeds, St George’s Hospital in Tooting, Solihull Hospital, the William Harvey Hospital in Ashford, Kent,
