Use Nightingale Hospitals to offset cancer crisis – The Yorkshire Post says

Even though it has taken the proposed imposition of measures in London and the South that the North has been facing for months to exercise some MPs, the most effective way of helping the economy is by beating the virus.

But it also requires radical rethinking by Matt Hancock, the Health and Social Care Secretary, to prevent Covid leading to a bleaker prognosis for all those people requiring lifesaving cancer care at this critical moment in time.

This comes after Yorkshire MPs warned earlier this month that breast cancer patients risked becoming “collateral damage” because of treatment delays and now scientists warn that major advances in cancer research could be delayed by almost a year and a half due to the pandemic.

Yet, just as there should be no reason for the development of Covid vaccines to take place alongside the work that comes under the auspices of the Institute of Cancer Research which has produced the new report, it is the same with the daily treatment of seriously ill cancer patients.

Now, more than ever, is the time to utilise the network of Nightingale Hospitals, like the facility in Harrogate, for their intended purpose – the treatment of Covid victims – so that existing hospitals can devote more resources to the needs of cancer patients, and others, in a ‘bio-secure’ medical environment.

Having gone to so much effort and expense to build the Nightingales, it is, frankly, folly not to start deploying them when this is traditinally the busiest, and most challenging, time of the year for hospitals and NHS staff as winter pressures take their toll.

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