Britain has fewer hospital beds than all European Union nations apart from Sweden and has lost 25,000 beds in the last decade alone. That’s according to analysis by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine.
It claims that hospitals are “fit to bursting” and that this is putting patients lives at risk.
According to The Times:
A damning report found that Britain has fewer hospital beds than all European Union nations apart from Sweden. Owing to staffing shortages there are 2.42 beds per 1,000 people in Britain, compared with 8 per 1,000 in Germany and 5.9 in France.
Analysis by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) found there were 163,000 hospital beds in the UK: 24,863 fewer than in 2010. This meant that thousands of patients a month ended up waiting in overwhelmed A&E units or ambulances.
Last month a record 24,000 patients in England were stuck on trolleys in A&Es for more than 12 hours before being admitted, a 45-fold increase compared with April last year.
The RCEM said an extra 4,500 beds, staffed by new nurses and doctors, were needed in the next six months to ensure safe care this winter, and 13,000 were needed in the next five years.
The NHS has pursued a policy of shutting hospital beds as medical advances meant fewer patients needed an overnight stay. However, medical leaders have warned that this policy will backfire as hospitals face greater demand from an ageing population
The report said that the UK has fewer intensive care beds than most European nations, which risks “unnecessary deaths due to bottlenecks”.
Elective surgery such as hip replacements is being cancelled because of a lack of beds, making it impossible to reduce a record waiting list of 6.4 million.
Last month the government introduced a health and social care levy to help clear the Covid backlog, but NHS leaders say that the money will not be sufficient unless there is a workforce plan.
There are 110,000 vacancies in the NHS, including shortages of 40,000 nurses and 8,000 doctors.
The number of NHS hospital beds in the UK has more than halved in the last 30 years, from around 299,000 in 1988 to 141,000 in 2020.
In that time, the population has grown from 56.8 million to 68.2 million people.
You don’t need to be a genius to understand that this is unsustainable.
Covid lockdowns were justified by the need to protect the NHS from being overwhelmed.
Nobody in the media thought it worth mentioning to Boris Johnson at the relentless Downing Street Covid press conferences, that if you reduce bed capacity by half over three decades, you can’t credibly claim that Covid (or anything else) is overwhelming the NHS.
What a scam.
