David Oliver: Losing too many NHS hospital beds has been an act of avoidable self-sabotage with predictable consequences
In recent decades we’ve surely lost too many general and acute hospital beds in the UK, without creating sufficient alternative capacity outside hospital. This has resulted in entirely predictable risks and harms. Serious shortages in available hospital bed capacity are a major contributor to our current crisis in urgent and emergency care. These shortages lead to long waits and overcrowding in emergency departments, the risks and indignities of “corridor care” reported so graphically in a recent Royal College of Nursing report,1 and handover delays for patients in ambulances waiting on forecourts. Performance against national four hour and 12 hour targets to “assess, discharge, or admit” has worsened dramatically since 2010, when we were still hitting the 95% target for four hour waits—whereas now NHS England has set a target of just 78% for March 2025.2 Performance against ambulance handover and response time indicators has also worsened dramatically.34 The effects of bed shortages d
