07.10.15
Half of NHS beds could face the axe – Lord Prior
Lord Prior, current minister for NHS Productivity and former chairman of the CQC, said that 50% of NHS beds could be axed in an email to consultancy firm McKinsey.
The email, revealed by the Daily Mirror after a freedom of information request, was sent to a senior executive at the firm following the pair’s tour of private health facilities in the United States.
Lord Prior listed “six big messages” he had learnt after the tour, the “biggest” of which was that “50% of hospital beds could close”.
He also said that the NHS was “not as bad as we think”.
The message was sent when Lord Prior was still chairman of the CQC before he left the regulator in May following his ministerial appointment.
But in a written statement issued in response to the paper’s investigation, he said: “These comments were made before I was a minister, do not reflect my view now and certainly do not reflect the view of the government.”
The investigation fuelled backlash from the BMA and union Unite.
Dr Kailash Chand, deputy chairman of the BMA, told the Mirror that the government was “already doing” what Lord Prior suggested in the email, adding: “The NHS in 2015 is demoralised, degraded, confused.
“Lord Prior’s description of cutting 50% of beds is already being enacted. Several thousand hospital beds have already been axed.”
And Gail Cartmail, assistant general secretary of Unite, said the email raised “serious questions” about the government’s plans for the health service. She told the paper that it was “alarming” to see Lord Prior discuss possibilities of “such drastic cuts” with a “very senior person in the private sector”.
Heidi Alexander MP, shadow health secretary, claimed it was “no wonder” that people “don’t trust the Tories with the NHS when they say one thing in public and another in private”.
She said: “Patients deserve to know whether the minister responsible for making £22bn worth of efficiency savings in the NHS still holds these views.
“With hospitals facing financial crisis this winter, the government must now come clean about what their plans to squeeze the NHS involve.”
But a Department of Health spokesperson said the numbers of hospital beds are “forecast to remain broadly stable in the coming years”.
Although the email was sent much earlier in the year, bed shortages have been a persistent problem in the NHS.
The Crisp Commission found in July that delayed discharges, unsuitable living conditions and inappropriate services were behind “excessive bed shortages” for mental health patients. It was later revealed through HSCIC figures that thousands of mental health patients were being forced to travel to find a bed – sometimes more than 50km.
Monitor has also blamed very high bed occupancy rates in hospitals for the worst A&E performance in a decade against the four-hour emergency care standard last winter.
And the “chronic underfunding” of social care by councils could also worsen the bed shortage crisis by 40,000 places, according to the National Care Association.