HYGIENIC cladding supplied by a Bradford company has been installed at the new Nightingale Hospital in London.
The white PVC cladding sheets from Am-Clad were cut to size to create hygienic surfaces for the partition walls which separate the hundreds of bed units.
The original order was doubled to 2,310 sheets and the second consignment was delivered on Thursday.
The logistics of supplying the sheets and customer liaison has been handled by Cladding Warehouse, a sister company of Am-Clad in the same Bradford office.
Cladding Warehouse director Gillian Jago says the company is continuing to supply NHS hospitals throughout the UK and has also received a substantial hygienic cladding order for a testing laboratory in Buckinghamshire where tests for Covid-19 are being carried out.
Rows upon rows of cubicles hastily erected in London’s ExCel centre show the expected scale of the explosion in numbers of coronavirus patients.
Soldiers and trade contractors are converting the exhibition centre, which usually hosts spectacles and conferences, into the first of the NHS Nightingale hospitals.
The effort should see the temporary facility in the capital’s Docklands open its doors this week to its first patients, with capacity ultimately reaching 4,000 beds.
Initially 500 beds equipped with ventilators and oxygen will be used to treat the seriously ill, and their numbers are expected to swell in the capital ahead of the rest of the nation.
The NHS will build more temporary hospitals in Birmingham, Manchester, Cardiff and Scotland.
The task of boosting critical care capacity has been under way since the health service declared an emergency at the end of January.
Before the scale of the crisis became clear, the UK was believed to have had one of the lowest proportions of intensive care units in Europe, but NHS England chief executive Sir Simon Stevens says 33,000 beds are now available for Covid-19 patients.
More than 9,000 people who have tested positive for coronavirus are being treated in hospitals across England, NHS England’s chief executive Sir Simon Stevens has said.
Speaking to the BBC on a visit to the new NHS Nightingale Hospital in London, Sir Simon said that the number of patients will increase, but explained that services set up to handle additional capacity will be available later this week.
