NHS boss admits hospitals need MORE beds because years of cost-cutting closures went too far and left wards ‘overly pressurised’
- NHS England chief executive, Simon Stevens, made the comments to colleagues
- Speaking at a conference he said remaining beds are now ‘overly pressurised’
- Bed occupancy rates haven’t been at the recommended level since 2011
The boss of the NHS has admitted the health service went over the top with bed closures and needs to start opening them again.
Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England, suggested at a conference that the policy had had disastrous results.
He said the remaining beds are now ‘overly pressurised’ and more should be made available to ease hospitals’ workloads.
There were around 130,000 hospital beds available in March last year, compared to 144,000 in 2010.
Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England (pictured at a separate talk at the Oxford Union), said closing hospital beds to save money over recent years is now unsustainable
‘The reality is that we are now at a point where our hospital bed stock is, if anything, overly pressurised,’ Mr Stevens said, according to the British Medical Journal.
He made the comments in a speech to other managers within the health service at the NHS Confederation conference in Manchester.
‘In many parts of the country there will need to be – backed by extra nurses and workforce – increased capacity in parts of the acute sector, not decreased capacity,’ he added.
‘That represents quite a significant gear shift in our assumptions, which need to be stress tested against these local plans.
‘But we are now at that point where we can see that the previous trend may not be sustainable.’
Mr Stevens’ comments mark a U-turn on the NHS policy of closing inpatient beds in the hope that improved social care would reduce the need for them.
Hospitals in England had 144,455 overnight beds available at the beginning of 2010, but this had dropped to 129,992 by the beginning of 2019.
This drop of 10 per cent has coincided with the country failing for eight years to hit its target of keeping 15 per cent of beds empty.
An occupancy rate of more than 85 per cent would lead to regular shortages, ‘periodic bed crises’ and more people catching infections while in hospital, according to the NHS regulator NICE.
But between January and March this year 89.1 per cent of beds were occupied, and the last time the figure was below 85 per cent was in the summer of 2011.
The number of patients being kept in beds has dropped, however, from 122,551 on average in spring 2010 to 115,874 at the beginning of this year.
To boost the number of beds, however, Mr Stevens said the NHS would have to go to the Government and ‘win an argument’ to get more money.
He added: ‘It is perfectly understandable that at a time of austerity there has been such a financial squeeze on capital funding.
‘But that is not a sustainable position looking out over the next five years, particularly given that for good reasons, routes such as [private finance initiatives] PFI and PF2 have been closed off, and therefore the only alternative is public investment.’