Nightingale Hospitals

As part of Covid-19 response, Dearden HR were asked to lead on the set up and implementation of the workforce requirements for one of the NHS Nightingale units. The Nightingale was a 120 bedded purpose built unit providing ventilated, non-ventilated capacity and end of life care for patients with Covid-19 Dearden HR worked with the Host Trust and other leads throughout the project, ensuring a smooth transition prior to formal handover at the end of May 2020.

Key to the requirement was that the project needed to be delivered at pace and within an 8-week timescale. Dearden HR worked with Senior Responsible Officers (SRO) from other workstreams, the Project Management Office (PMO), Estates, clinical teams from the host Trust, Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), Health Education England, NHS Leadership Academy colleagues, the military, NHS England/Improvement (NHSE/I), regional and national trade union representatives, Chief Executives and HR Directors from across two Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships (STPs) to ensure that the hospital was built on time and was fit for purpose.

A team of five Consultants from Dearden HR worked on the project with Dearden’s Managing Director, Mark Gammage, appointed as SRO for the workstream. Each Consultant was appointed as lead for a specific workstream including recruitment, clinical modelling and deployment, training, induction and orientation, welfare and support and policies with Dearden also providing project support. Key to delivery was engaging with the host Trust and clinical teams to ensure all workstream outputs were agreed and aligned with key dependencies.