There are brightly painted bicycles in the corridors at Aarhus hospital in Denmark. The doctors and nurses use them to get around the 500,000 sq m estate, which serves 350,000 people on the Jutland peninsula. Some patients arrive by helicopter from up to 150km away, while those walking into A&E tap their medical cards on to a reader, giving the clinicians instant access to their records.
Despite its size, the hospital has a personal touch. There are no wards in the gleaming new blocks. Instead, patients are treated in individual rooms, reducing infection rates and improving recovery times. Nor do alarms ring relentlessly. If someone asks for help then a message is sent directly to their nurse. A patient hotel means people can be moved quickly out of acute beds.
This is the first of a new generation of super-hospitals that have helped to turn the Danish health system into one of the best in the world. The small Scandinavian country with a population of less than six million has improved outcomes and driven efficiency by bringing urgent treatment into large specialist centres, harnessing the power of technology and transforming community care.
The emphasis is on keeping people out of hospital and encouraging independence for patients as part of a whole health ecosystem. While in England 10 per cent of hospital beds are taken up by patients who are well enough to go home after treatment, in Aarhus the figure is less than 3 per cent. The local council has a legal duty to provide social care for any patient who is fit to be discharged. If the municipality cannot do so then it has to pay for the hospital bed.
The balance of spending has shifted as part of a national change in priorities. When the Aarhus super-hospital replaced four smaller hospitals last year, the total number of beds fell from 1,300 to 850. “We got a budget cut of 8 per cent when we relocated here but the efficiency is very much higher,” Poul Blaabjerg, the chief executive, says. “We treat a lot more patients with fewer resources. There has been a big reallocation of tasks from the hospitals to the municipalities.”