Move to axe 300 beds at hospitals

Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust chief executive Phil Morley said the figures were based on a regular census which showed 300 people were in hospital beds when they did not need to be.

The closures, which would affect both Hull Royal Infirmary and Castle Hill Hospital, would be phased, starting with an old ward on the Castle Hill site which needed around three-quarters of a million pounds spending on it.

Mr Morley said it would not lead to redundancies as they would cut back on their use of agency staff and locums which cost the hospital trust £15m a year.

However Ray Gray, regional officer for Unison, said the cuts amounted to 20 per cent of capacity, adding: “David Cameron says the NHS is ringfenced and frontline staff are protected, but it is absolute rubbish. We need to meet with management urgently to see what the consequences are.”

Mr Morley said: “Every single day we have over 300 patients who shouldn’t be in acute care. It is either they are waiting for discharge to care or waiting for a care home of their choice or some social care so they can go home. If you can get them to the right place, the right level of support, you could close some of the beds down.”

He said while changes to internal processes could amount to half the savings, they would have to cut beds, adding: “We can’t do it until the commissioners have found a way of moving people through to different areas.”

Talks are going on with the primary care trust to ensure people are directed to the service they need, rather than ending up in accident and emergency by default.

One option is a new integrated care centre on the Hull Royal Infirmary site, where GPs and consultants could work together; other measures include extending social workers’ hours so assessments can be carried out in the evenings to prevent beds being taken up unnecessarily.

Mr Morley said a dozen patients a week were being admitted with social care problems, not because there was anything medically wrong with them and there were 60 patients a day waiting for discharge into social care.

He said: “When the system doesn’t work the default has always been to keep people in hospital.”