- Royal College of Emergency Medicine: AE seeing more patients than ever before
- Blames growing elderly population, immigration and rising birth rates
- Says NHS has tried unsuccessfully to improve the ‘flow’ of patients
- Calling for no more wards to be closed amid the funding crisis
Kate Pickles For Mailonline
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The crisis facing the NHS has reached ‘tipping point’ with 20 more hospitals needed to cope with spiralling demand, experts have said.
The NHS is facing a ‘tsunami’ of patients in its AE departments and cannot close any more beds.
Instead, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM), suggested the country instead needs to open more AEs to meet the needs of the nation.
Vice-president, Dr Chris Moulton, said higher levels of immigration, a rising elderly population and the increasing birth rate meant more hospitals are needed.
‘So with the demographic change of the country you don’t have to be an arithmetic genius to say ”If you’ve got a 10 per cent bigger country, we need 10 per cent more hospitals”, he said.
The number of people visiting our accident and emergency departments has grown from 18.8 million a year to nearly 23 million a year, in the last decade, figures have shown
‘We have got 180-184 DGHs (district general hospitals), so call it 200, if you have got a 10 per cent increase in the country we would need another 20.’
Meanwhile, NHS England medical director Professor Sir Bruce Keogh highlighted the rising tide of patients going to AE.
‘Over the last decade the number of people visiting our accident and emergency departments has grown from 18.8 million a year to nearly 23 million a year – a 22 per cent increase,’ Sir Bruce said.
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‘We need to improve the offer for people out of hospitals, in order to alleviate some of the tsunami of people who are attending AE, because the lights are on and because they know they’ll get a good deal there, and because that they will leave within four hours.’
Dr Moulton said the alternative to increasing the number of hospitals was solving ‘flow’ problems in hospitals.
But he added the issue has not been tackled in more than two decades.
‘We need as many beds per capita as the rest of the developed world. We need a dramatic increase in the number of beds.
NHS England medical director Professor Sir Bruce Keogh described the current levels as a ‘tsunami’ in AE
‘But we wouldn’t need that if we managed to improve flow, but we haven’t managed to.’
Former president of the RCEM Dr Cliff Mann told delegates at the conference in London, that there are ‘perverse’ incentives in the system, which mean that patients are being trapped in hospital beds while waiting for social care.
Dr Mann, who now works as a clinical adviser for NHS England as well as being an emergency care consultant, said: ‘There are perverse incentives within health and social care, otherwise why would you be keeping people in hospital at four times the cost at what it would be cheaper to have them in social care?
‘That can only be because you’ve created systems which encourage that financial madness.
‘The problem we have is that we continue to reduce the number of beds, and we have done that incredibly successfully over the last 20-30 years under all forms of government, and that allowed hospitals to strip out costs.
‘The easiest way to save £1 million a year is to shut a ward, but you can follow any argument to an absurdity.
‘And we have got to a tipping point now when we compare ourselves to international norms to suggest that the capacity to reduce further beds has gone.
‘What we must need to do to increase the flow and access to beds is to tackle delayed transfers of care, because these people have been kidnapped by the system.’
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