Latest performance figures show further decline
The latest NHS performance figures are a stark reminder of the scale of the task Keir Starmer’s government faces if it is to implement its manifesto commitment to “Build an NHS fit for the future”.
To sum up: there are too few hospital beds, too many patients staying too long in hospital, and far too many long delays in emergency departments, community services and mental health – and this is only looking at July, once a relatively easy month, not looking ahead to the looming winter pressures.
Average bed occupancy for England’s acute hospitals was 92.6% in July: the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) stressed that this is well above the 85% occupancy considered “safe”. To get back to that would need an impossible extra 8,800 beds.
But the average figure, as always, conceals some very worrying higher figures. The sitrep figures for July show 32 trusts with 95 percent of more of their beds occupied, and therefore running on the edge of crisis levels in the middle of summer.
One of the unresolved reasons for these very high occupancy levels is the lack of adequate community health and social care to support patients discharged from hospital, leaving 55 trusts with more than 30 percent of their beds filled by patients who had been there for over 14 days. For seven trusts (Epsom & St Helier, North Middlesex, Mid Cheshire, Liverpool University Hospitals, Clatterbridge Cancer centre, University Hospitals Sussex, and the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital) that figure was 40 percent or more.
Perhaps even more worrying is the fact that a third of Integrated Care Boards (and 51 trusts) averaged 20 percent (one in five) or more of their beds occupied for over 21 days.
Full story in The Lowdown, 14 August 2024