The nursing team at Swift Management Services Limited were delighted to be part of the commissioning team which transformed the Excel Exhibition Centre in East London into a 4000 bed hospital to treat Covid-19 patients who need ventilation to support their breathing.
We were not as you might expect part of the nursing team, instead part of the Facilities Management Commissioning team, working with the amazing staff of the NHS to pull together what is the first of possibly many Nightingale Hospitals across the UK.
The NHS team supported by the Army as mentors, designed and started to build a hospital which opened its doors in only nine days.
The thousands of people involved from NHS executives & staff, along with contractors and consultants worked day and night to bring this hospital into use. This is something that can normally take years to achieve.
The teams worked on individual parts of the project; every possible consideration was taken into account to ensure that the new field hospital could provide the very best of NHS care that we have all become used to in
current health crisis. Within just 9 days the hospital was taking shape. The hospital wards were named and the equipment was being installed.
There was a training centre established to train the new staff for the hospital on a day by day basis. It was remarkable to see who everyone pulled together.
Whilst the project is an NHS project the army leant a hand as mentors to ensure that we all kept pace and we had thought of everything.
In what was known as the Auditorium a massive canteen was opened to feed the workforce and what an amazing job they did, given the hundreds of staff which they fed without falter every day. Whilst everyone working on the project hopes it will never be fully utilised as that would mean the virus continues, everyone has worked so very hard to make this happen and the team at Swift Management Services Limited are proud to have been a very small part of an enormous project.
We are so very proud of everyone who has been involved and we salute the Clinical Team who will work 24 hours a day to preserve life.
It goes to show when there is a crisis the UK spirit still steps up to the challenge and it this case it was the NHS.