1,400 beds empty due to staffing crisis in NHS

MORE than 1,400 hospital beds are lying empty in ghost wards, figures reveal.

Some 82 wards have been mothballed across the NHS – enough to fill two hospitals. Experts said they were out of action due to a lack of staff and money.

But Labour said it was a scandal when the health service was desperately short of beds.

Figures obtained by the party through freedom of information show 1,429 beds were not in use as of September 2017.

This number has trebled since September 2013 when there were just 503 unused beds.

Yet this winter many hospitals were overcrowded and bed occupancy rates reached unprecedented levels. Patients were left on trolleys in corridors in A&E, sometimes lined up in rows as they waited for a free bed.

Labour’s health spokesman Jonathan Ashworth said: ‘This is a time of national crisis for our NHS. We’ve had patients stuck on trolleys in hospital corridors and logjammed A&E wards for hours and hours on end.

‘These are stunning revelations at a time of growing demand on NHS services. For wards to be decommissioned is yet another clear consequence of Theresa May’s dire mishandling of the NHS combined with years of desperate underfunding.’

Dr Nick Scriven, president of the Society for Acute Medicine, said the situation was ‘almost always caused by not having enough money or staff’.