Updates
Update, 8 April
Published: 08 April 2020
NHS Nightingale Hospital Birmingham
Great progress is being made on the new NHS Nightingale Hospital Birmingham.
Today we can share more information and pictures of how work is going on this extraordinary project at the NEC led by University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust.
NHS Nightingale Hospital Birmingham is a new hospital, built to provide care for an increased number of patients requiring treatment during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The objectives of the Nightingale Hospital Birmingham are to:
- Free capacity in acute providers, by consolidating general medical COVID-19 patients, allowing referring hospitals to maintain flow in and out of their surge capacity
- Provide single specialty general medical care
- Allow intensive care manpower and expertise resource to be concentrated within existing hospital sites where the acuity is highest
Based at the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) near Birmingham International Airport, the hospital will provide up to 4,000 fully-equipped beds that will be ready to support patients with COVID-19 who may no longer need intensive hospital care.
The hospital will initially provide an additional 496 beds in 4 x 124 bed wards with a 100 bed critical care unit (Phase 1) with up to 800 beds staffed by 30 April if necessary.
The capacity will then continue to increase as necessary, through the following phases, as required:
- Phase 2: Expansion to 2,000 beds
- Phase 3: Expansion to 4,000 beds
Information about getting to Nightingale Hospital Birmingham is available via the link below.
Construction video
Childcare over Easter
For the latest information on how Easter may affect childcare available to key workers, please see the "Easter school and childcare provision" page:
Clinical Laboratory Services update: B12 assay failure
Due to assay failure and the laboratories current inability to troubleshoot due to the coronavirus pandemic, they are unable to process samples for B12 on the QEHB site.
They will send any samples with a low folate to the Heartlands laboratory for B12 analysis, but it simply isn’t feasible to do this for all specimens.