Hospitals Need to Shrink to Save NHS,Thinktank Says

Hospitals need to become smaller,with fewer beds,to help save the NHS from its “permacrisis”,a thinktank has said.

The role hospitals play needs to undergo “a basic reinvention” to help them escape the overcrowding that has become widespread over the last decade, according to the thinktank Re:State.

Politicians and NHS leaders will have to be prepared to push through a potentially controversial program of downsizing hospitals for the service to remain viable, it adds.

The thinktank – formerly called Reform – argues in a new report that doing so will save the NHS billions of pounds, lead to better care for patients and relieve pressure on overworked staff.

Hospitals could shrink in size, shedding thousands of beds, as the result of a massive expansion of care delivered in and near people’s homes. People will have much less need to go to or stay in hospital if they can access diagnostic tests, outpatient appointments and treatment at home or in community settings, to reflect the changed nature of illness that an ageing population has brought, it says.

Rosie Beacon, the author of the report, said: “It’s less about counting beds but about what hospitals do and how they do it. Hospitals can become smaller because you can give people the same standard – and often a better range – of care without them being physically present. That [would produce] lower long-term running costs and a system that’s financially sustainable.

“Hospitals shouldn’t be made smaller just for the sake of it but as how and where we deliver secondary care no longer needs to be confined to a hospital bed.”