How many people were treated in Covid-19 Nightingale hospitals?

There is some confusion online regarding the Nightingale hospitals set up during the pandemic to provide critical care and other facilities.

A number of Facebook users have suggested that these hospitals cost £532 million and “treated a total of 54 patients”, but this isn’t quite right.

How much did the Nightingale hospitals cost?

There were seven temporary hospitals established in England in the early months of the pandemic. A written question answered by then-health minister Lord Bethell in 2021 suggested these cost £220 million to set up and were expected to cost £532 million in total. However, more recent figures from the National Audit Office put the estimated total lifetime spend at £362 million as of June 2022 when considering running costs and the amount it cost to decommission or repurpose them.

Temporary hospitals were also set up in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales which are not factored into this cost.

How many patients did they treat?

Data on exactly how many people were treated in these hospitals during the pandemic is limited, but while we can say for certain that it was more than 54 the estimated total number is still low.

Admissions to the Nightingale hospitals were recorded and have been published by NHS England, however two of the seven temporary hospitals do not appear in these figures. We’ve asked NHS England for more information about this.

With the data we do have from the NHS we can see that between March 2020 and April 2021, 270 patients were treated at four of the seven Nightingale hospitals. Data is available for a fifth hospital but it shows it admitted no patients in that period.

In their own analysis which appears to use data from the UK Health Security Agency, the King’s Fund counts around 380 patients treated across the same period.