Think-tank casts doubt over plans to cut NHS hospital beds amid signs of strain on services

HOSPITALS ARE struggling to cope as the number of inpatient beds continues to be slashed across the health service, an influential thinktank has warned.

A report from the King’s Fund found that the health service in England is facing increasing pressure as it goes into the winter months.

At the same time, blueprints drawn up locally but demanded by NHS England – known as sustainability and transformation plans (STPs) – have set out proposals to cut hospital beds even further. Last winter, hospitals across the UK declared major alerts and closed their A&E doors, with an average of more than 90 per cent beds full across the service. At various points, hospitals had around 96 per cent of their beds full and regularly went above 95 per cent. Anything above 85 per cent increases the risk to patients from infection and is considered unsafe.

The study says that with hospitals already full STP proposals in some areas to cut beds are “undesirable and unachievable”.

The number of NHS hospital beds in England has more than halved over the last 30 years, from around 299,000 to 142,000.

The report said this was partly because more patients with mental illness and learning disabilities are cared for in the community and patients generally need to spend less time in hospital than in the past. But it warns that the NHS “now has fewer acute hospital beds per person than almost any other comparable health system”.

Helen McKenna, inset,senior policy adviser at the King’s Fund and one of the report authors, said: “There are opportunities to make better use of existing beds and initiatives to capitalise on these should continue. But with many hospitals already stretched to breaking point, reductions on the scale we know have been proposed in some areas are neither desirable nor achievable.”