Emergency hospital opens in Docklands

By New Worker correspondent

A giant emergency hospital was opened by Prince Charles last week in London’s ExCel conference centre Docklands. The prince, himself recovering from a mild case of COVID-19, conducted the ceremony through a video-link from his Birkhall mansion on the Balmoral estate in the Scottish Highlands.

The 4,000 bed NHS Nightingale hospital was erected inside the cavernous ExCel centre in just nine days. Essentially a ‘field hospital’, it was built with the help of some 200 soldiers from the Anglian Regiment and the Gurkha Rifles, working long shifts alongside NHS staff and contractors.

The 87,328 square metres of double exhibition halls have been fitted out with the framework for more than 80 wards, each with 42 beds. Some 500 fully-equipped beds, with oxygen and ventilators, are already operational. The nearby City Airport, currently closed for normal flights due to the coronavirus plague, will be used by military planes to bring supplies and equipment to the hospital.

“It’s nothing short of extraordinary that this new hospital in London has been established from scratch in less than a fortnight,” NHS England Chief Executive Sir Simon Stevens told the media. “Now we are gearing up to repeat that feat at another four sites across the country to add to the surge in capacity in current NHS hospitals.”

Opened in November 2000, the ExCel Centre in east London was bought by the Arab-owned Abu Dhabi National Exhibitions Company (ADNEC) in May 2008. ADNEC was originally going to charge the health service some £2–3million per month for use of the site; but this provoked an angry response from Labour and the giant GMB union that has many members in the NHS and the ambulance service.

Labour Shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth said the deal was “an absolute outrage. Staff and patients will be disgusted at the billionaire owners. They should be prepared to offer the facilities for free”. And Lola McEvoy, a GMB organiser specialising in outsourced workers, said it was “simply wrong that the government could funnel cash to crown princes to deal with an urgent public health crisis while the future of low-paid outsourced workers hangs in the balance”.

In the end the owners soon backed down. ExCel chief executive Jeremy Rees said an initial agreement with the NHS to house the temporary Nightingale Hospital "included a contribution to some fixed costs" but "We have since decided to cover the fixed costs ourselves. The Excel London facility is fully available to the NHS and we are here to support all their needs and requirements during this crisis”.

This was repeated by Humaid Matar Al Dhaheri, the managing director and group chief executive of ADNEC, who said: “To be clear, profit has always been the furthest thing from our minds. It is our firm commitment that we will not charge a penny for the use of our facilities, and we will provide the NHS with the operational and logistical support it needs for NHS Nightingale London.”