The island’s response and management of the current coronavirus outbreak is significant in Jersey’s living memory. This event may turn out to be as decisive as the German Occupation in 1940-45. A temporary field hospital has been built at Millbrook Playing Field as part of Jersey’s defence against a spread of the pandemic. Site preparation began on 9 April and on the 200th anniversary of the birth of Florence Nightingale, Jersey’s own, temporary, Nightingale Wing of the General Hospital was officially opened by HRH The Earl of Wessex, Prince Edward via video link. The Jersey Nightingale Hospital create an additional 180 beds for coronavirus patients, who will be provided with acute, enhanced and ongoing levels of medical care.
In the past five weeks I have been visiting the site at Millbrook in the parish of St Lawrence where I live. Focusing on the people involved in building it from official visits by politicians, civil servants, project managers and trade professionals to the many men and women of health professionals, volunteers and cleaners preparing the field hospital for operational service. The project is divided into two halves: Care & Construction and on completion a set of images will be part of the Island Lockdown collection at the Société Jersiaise Photographic Archive, the island’s principal photographic collection with over 100,000 images dating from the mid-1840s to the present day.
The Nightingale Wing is now on standby awaiting its first patients of Covid-19 after a 36 hours of assimilation where staff and volunteers acted out a number of clinical scenarios as a means to train its personnel and monitor how the field hospital itself would cope in a perceived spike of new cases emerging as the current island lockdown is slowly being lifted. This sense of theatre and play is essential to the very nature of photography which from its very outset in early 19th century was imbued with a degree of artifice.
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