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Around 13,000 more hospital beds are needed in the UK to enable the NHS to fully meet the population’s health needs, according to a new report by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM).
The report, Beds in the NHS, found that the NHS has lost almost 25,000 beds across the UK since 2010/11. This loss of beds has happened at an alarming rate and has significantly impacted patient safety.
Patients are now facing long waiting times to be admitted with emergency department staff forced to provide care normally provided in wards, ambulance handover delays have increased and planned operations are being cancelled.
Cuts to mental health beds have led to additional pressure not only on the mental health sector but also on the acute sector as patients seek treatment outside of appropriate care settings.
Mental health beds must be a key focus
For these reasons, the RCEM recommends that an additional 4,500 beds are made available in the UK between now and next Winter, and approximately 8,500 more over the next five years.
These beds should be allocated based on a local assessment of hospital needs, and care providers must ensure that this allocation does not worsen health inequalities.
The College adds that the mental health sector should be a key focus, and care providers should consider creating assessment areas for short term, resource intensive assessment of people suffering a mental health crisis, as this would improve care and patient experience.
New workforce strategy must set out solutions to “increase recruitment and improve retention”
Rory Deighton, Acute Lead at the NHS Confederation is calling for a “fully-funded, long-term plan for the health and social care workforce” and urgent investment in social care, as this would “improve flow and ensure those patients medically fit for discharge can be returned to the community where there needs can be better met.”
“It is only with these additional measures that the NHS can operate as a resilient and sustainable system that can move through the elective backlog as efficiently as possible and provide the best possible care,” he said.
Andrew Goddard, president of the RCP, added that, in light of the report, the NHS England workforce strategy “must look at what we know about current actual and predicted future demand for services and set out a range of short and long-term solutions to increase recruitment and improve retention.”
“This is the only way we will truly keep pace with the growing need for healthcare,” he said.