Guests rave about the sea views from the best rooms at Newquay’s Carnmarth hotel, looking out over Fistral beach, one of Cornwall’s finest surfing destinations. Even out of season, a double can cost £150 a night and must normally be booked months in advance. Now, though, the panorama is being enjoyed by a different kind of guest after the hotel was turned into an emergency care home for patients discharged from hospital in an effort to clear beds during the coronavirus crisis. Three Cornish hotels and one in West Yorkshire are among the first to reopen as what have been called “Nightingale care homes”, plugging the gap between hospital and social care for those who have suffered conditions other than Covid-19. So far about 30 people have stayed at the Carnmarth and Penventon Park, a luxury four-star spa hotel in Redruth, as part of Cornwall council’s hospital discharge plan during the pandemic. A third hotel, the St Moritz in Trebetherick, is on standby should the county experience a Covid-19 surge. Rob Rotchell, cabinet member for adults at Cornwall council, has been coordinating what it calls its “discharge lounges”. He said: “We opened the first one on 27 March. I think we were the first to do it. At that time there was an expectation that the whole NHS was going to be absolutely flooded. We needed somewhere else to put people who were well enough to be discharged from hospital but were not well enough to manage on their own at home … At the same time, a lot of hotels were closing because there were no tourists coming so it seemed an ideal opportunity for us. There’s a double benefit really.” The council pays the hotels around £100 a room a night to cover catering and housekeeping costs, said Rotchell. On top of that, they fund an army of carers to tend to the new residents between once and four times a day. It’s a much more efficient way of working, without carers spending hours each day in their cars navigating Cornwall’s narrow lanes. The seaside vistas appear to be speeding convalescence. “There’s this great story of a chappie that was discharged from the Royal Cornwall hospital in Truro to Newquay. Let me tell you, the view from the hospital rooms in Truro isn’t great. Usually you can just see a bit of wall. This chappie was admitted to the Carnmarth with a view over Fistral beach. What I am told is that he was much brighter, psychologically, because he had this fabulous view and could see the sun setting over the sea,” said Rotchell. Around 350 miles north, just off the M62, the Cedar Court hotel in Huddersfield this week accepted its first guests after becoming an emergency care home after a breakneck, three-week refit. Its new residents will either have been discharged from hospital, as in Cornwall, or may come as part of a respite deal between the council and their families. There are 113 rooms but Calderdale council has struck a deal to use a maximum of 70 during the crisis with an option to scale up if the local hospitals become overwhelmed. One of the first guests was a young man in his 20s with learning difficulties. “His family was struggling to keep their son at home during lockdown, when the day services he accessed were all closed. We offered to put him in Cedar Court as respite,” said Iain Baines, Calderdale council’s director of adult services and wellbeing. The hotel may also step in if the council’s normal care providers are unable to assist, added Baines. “At the moment, 13% of staff working for those providers are off sick, either with Covid symptoms or because a family member is ill or because they are shielding themselves. The idea with Cedar Court came about as part of our scenario planning to make sure care needs are met,” he said. No one who has tested positive for Covid-19 is allowed into any of the hotels. In Calderdale, the council is separately preparing a type of holding centre for patients well enough to be discharged from hospital who haven’t yet had their test results back. Located in a former care home in the village of West Vale, two miles outside Halifax, it will keep residents in much stricter isolation than at Cedar Court, said Baines. As of Friday, 53 people in Calderdale were confirmed to have died from Covid-19, 23 of whom passed away in care homes. Boris Johnson claims the nadir has been reached nationally, but Baines thinks the worst is yet to come for Calderdale. “Social care has not yet reached its peak,” he said. “We are two or three weeks behind our own acute [hospital] trust. I think we will probably see care home [deaths] continue to rise over the next few weeks but I would hope with the measures we are putting in place we will be able to reduce the prevalence in care homes as much as possible.” The four hotels in Cornwall and Huddersfield have all been registered as care homes with the Care Quality Commission (CQC), which regulates the sector. A CQC spokesperson said: “In this period of unprecedented pressure we want to support health and social care providers to increase capacity as part of the ongoing effort to respond to Covid-19 ... A Covid-19 registration is any ‘application’ from a health or social care provider where they intend to deliver services which provide additional health and social care capacity in an area; or contribute to the control of the outbreak or the treatment of people who have contracted the illness. All applications relating to Covid-19 will be prioritised by CQC so that we can ensure the health and social care system is in the best position possible to meet this increased need.”