KGH boss confirms children will return to Skylark Ward next month

Kettering General Hospital's boss confirmed that children would be able to use the bespoke Skylark Ward from March - two months after the facility was converted for use by Covid patients.

Last month, this paper revealed plans to move children into other wards on the Rothwell Road site's Rockingham Wing as the number of patients requiring oxygen grew at an alarming rate.

She had warned that if cases continued to rise they might have to look at working with nearby Northampton General Hospital.

But at today's (Friday's) weekly Covid press conference, responding to a question from this newspaper, KGH chief executive Eileen Doyle confirmed Skylark Ward would return to its former use soon.

She said: "We moved our paediatric ward, Skylark, a couple of weeks ago to create more capacity for adults and to distribute the oxygen requirement around the site.

"It's definitely decompressed the pressures on adult beds across the site but we are planning to move them [paediatrics] back to Skylark by the middle of March at the latest."

Thanking her paediatric colleagues for facilitating the move, she added that the move would not be sooner due to some work that needed to be done on the ward.

She said: "I don't want to jump the gun because we need a little bit more capacity in the system. We need to do some enabling work around ventilation so that's allowed us to have a little bit of space in the system, to get that work done. That will be happening in the next couple of weeks."

Ms Doyle added that both NGH and KGH remained busy with 193 positive inpatients today (Friday) of which 38 are recovered and were waiting to be transferred.

She said: "We are in the middle of winter so it's not just Covid that we are dealing with but I am pleased to say that the number of Covid patients for another week on the trot are coming down - that is encouraging."

An inpatient vaccination programme, that is already up and running at NGH, will be rolled out to patients 'in beds' as well as to those who are receiving chemotherapy who are not in the priority groups being vaccinated by roving medics.