Heading into potentially the toughest winter in history, one key problem is keeping NHS bosses awake at night: they don’t have enough hospital beds.
When a hospital doesn’t have any empty beds, sick patients cannot be admitted to wards from A&E. If patients cannot be moved from A&E, emergency departments become too overcrowded to accept new ones. If ambulances cannot offload patients, paramedics are stuck queueing outside hospitals, unable to reach urgent 999 calls. The whole system becomes gridlocked, leading to delays in care that are costing lives.
Record NHS waiting times in recent weeks are rooted in the collapsing social care system. Hospitals are having to act as de-facto care homes because there are no community care packages available. How did the care crisis
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