MORE details have been revealed as to how a Winchester hotel is being used to increase bed capacity during the coronavirus pandemic.

As previously reported, the Holiday Inn, in Telegraph Way is taking patients in a move owners InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) says is “contributing to the recovery effort”.

Now, Alex Whitfield, chief executive of Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, has said that the new site is being used to monitor patients recovering from the virus, with a more of a care home setting, and not used for patients who are acutely unwell.

“Hampshire County Council has stood up The Apollo hotel in Basingstoke and the Holiday Inn in Winchester,” she said.

“It is more of a care home type setting, there won’t be doctors onsite 24/7, there is social care providers, some nursing support and the idea is that these are for people that maybe if there was the right level of care around maybe could have gone home but actually there aren’t enough domiciliary carers or their home environment isn’t suitable so they can move to the hotel for the rehab and recovery end of their stay. They won’t be acutely unwell.

“It is all added capacity and it is making sure we are moving people out of the acute hospitals as soon as they don’t need to be in an acute hospital anymore."

The hospital has increased capacity in recent weeks. As well as the nationwide decreased on planned, non-urgent surgery, chemotherapy and oncology services have moved from Basingstoke and Winchester hospitals to BMI Sarum Road

The wards that now lie empty have been transformed into bed spaces and are ready to be used if required.

It is because of this increase in capacity that a Nightingale Hospital, like the one which opened recently at the ExCeL centre in London, is not required. However, Ms Whitfield said that it had been considered.

"There was quite a lot of work going on in the last couple of weeks on the ExCeL model, whether we are going to do something similar in the Basingstoke and Winchester area.

"The current modelling would suggest that we’re not going to require this at the current stage."