Not enough hospital beds and GPs closing | Letters

Dr Nick Mann says the King’s Fund report on hospital bed numbers is clear evidence that safe capacity in the NHS has been exceeded. Plus letters from Penny Elder and Michael Craig Watson and Emily Clare Baxter on GPs shutting up shop

Though thin on detail, CQC chief inspector of hospitals Professor Ted Baker’s belief in “an NHS fit for the 21st century” refers to the FYFV/STP’s app-driven, remote access and remote monitoring, downskilled vision of a tech-heavy health service. Here, increasing numbers of older people will not become acutely or terminally ill in a way that requires admission to an inexorably reducing number of hospital beds, services and staff per capita, because this will have been prevented by sheer willpower, neglect of the facts, and narrow repetition of misused research statistics. For instance, it is sheer and demonstrable nonsense to suggest that half of patients in hospital “don’t need to be there”. Probably 5%, maybe up to 12%.

Presumably, hospital staff are “piling patients into corridors” because of an embedded culture of cruelty, not due to year-on-year defunding of essential services in a safety-critical system. With record deficits in 2016 of £3.6bn (not £700m as stated by DoH), did hospitals throughout the country really become fiscally incompetent suddenly since 2012?

Continue reading... October 03, 2017 at 10:54PM