Thursday 10 June 2021 | 11:00-12:15

Format: Workshop

Stream: Building capability and leadership

In the first phase of the pandemic response, England’s NHS established several temporary hospitals to cope with surge demand. The ExCel centre in London, where the 2021 International Forum was due to have taken place, became NHS Nightingale London. This was an ICU facility in Spring 2020 and a step-down care facility in the second wave in early 2021, with comparable outcomes to other hospitals, and highly rated staff and patient/family experience measures.

In this interactive workshop session, people from the team who built and ran the London Nightingale field hospital in covid waves 1 and 2 will share their experience and learnings, including:

• Giving an overview of how the Nightingale hospital was conceived, built and opened to patients in less than three weeks in Spring 2020


• Describing how we built an operating system to meet the Nightingale’s twin goals – (i) to save lives and (ii) to best support staff caring for patients – which brought together “learning” and “doing” as one


• Exploring the role within the learning system played by the Bedside Learning Coordinator (BLC), a novel role in healthcare but frequent in industry. The BLC captured and distilled opportunities for improvement noticed by staff as they worked


• Sharing how learnings from Nightingale wave 1 played forward to Nightingale 2, with its different clinical model (step-down vs ICU patients), and how these insights are being now deployed in different contexts to support rebuilding services in light of the pandemic across London

After this session, participants will be able to:

• Describe the five core elements of a local learning system, and how to apply the principles of a learning system to their own organisation or system


• Apply the simple, intuitive “Fix, Improve, Change” approach to opportunities to do better within their own organisation or system


• Understand the principles underpinning Nightingale’s “OneTeam” approach and how staff welfare/staff experience was prioritised and organised at Nightingale


• Understand the leadership and other elements which underpinned Nightingale, combined with a set of “Top Tips” for applying the key insights to usual care settings and more normal times

James Mountford, NHS England and NHS Improvement; England

Dominique Allwood, Imperial College NHS Trust; England

Natalie Forrest, DH New Hospitals Programme; England

Nicole Lee, Broomfield Hospital; England

Jo Cooke, Great Ormond Street Hospital; England