From BBC Health today:
Thousands of extra hospital beds and hundreds of ambulances will be rolled out in England this year in a bid to tackle the long emergency care delays.
The 5,000 new beds will increase capacity by 5%, while there will be a 10% boost in the ambulance fleet with 800 new vehicles on the road.
Details of the £1bn investment will be set out later in a joint government and NHS England two-year blueprint.
But Labour said the plans were not enough to tackle the problems.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-64448354
A survey in 2020 found that NHS England had 135 574 beds and Scotland had 20 533, giving relative ratios of beds to population, of 1 to 413 in England and 1 to 265, far superior, in Scotland.
The additional 5 000 beds will make the English total, 140 574, marginally higher, by only 3.7% and the ratio still 1 to 400.
With 10 times the population, if all things were equal, NHS England could be expected to have roughly 200 000. NHS Scotland thus has 42.8% more beds per head of population.
The BBC’s Health Correspondent, Nick Trickle has not done any of the above sums.
Sources:
Hospital bed data
- NHS England Hospital bed data
- Hospital bed data provided by Welsh Government
- Hospital bed data provided by Public Health Scotland
- Hospital bed data provided by Northern Ireland Department of Health
- Care Quality Commission reports
- Individual NHS Trust websites and annual reports
- Responses to Freedom of Information requests from each NHS Trust
Talking-up Scotland 
Torygraf front page claims—
“NHS ordered to reveal TRUE A&E wait times”!
Will they? Will they really? Will the BEEB follow suit?
What will DRossie and Starwars say then?
Watch this space! But don’t hold your breath.
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The BBC could easily reveal NHS England’s true A&E figures, so what is holding them back?
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The Tories cut NHS funding from 2015 to 2020 by £20Billion. Instead of increasing it. Bad pandemic planning and mismanagement. Wasting £Billions that could have been sent on essential services. Concentrating on Brexit. Losing healthcare workers and £Billions more. £Billions that could have been spent on healthcare and essential services. A total mess and shambles killing people. The NHS needs £10Billion to get on track. Wasted by the Tories. Complete and utter mismanagement.
Some Trust’s concentrate on targets and statistics, They should have cancelled non urgent operations. To free up beds, Doctors and ambulances. In an emergency conditions. A short term solution in the worst months of winter. The most pressure on heakthcare. The Tories perfect storm. The pandemic and Brexit, The US/UK now starting illegal war in Europe. That will cost £Trillions. Johnston at it again with all the lies. Causing havoc and killing people to get dividends from illegal contracts. Breaking International Laws and Treaties.
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Is this another instance of the English taking British money and spending it on themselves or will we get a relative share as per the Barnet colonial kickback system?
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New beds – tick, new ambulances – tick
Increased pay to encourage new staff to fill the 150,000 vacancies in NHS England – oh no. The leasing companies and PFI contractors who will do well out of the first two wouldn’t agree to that
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That was my first thought, irrelevant how many new beds and ambulances you have if the Health boards can’t staff them, I’ve a feeling this will go the same as the ‘ new hospitals ‘ and new housing, nowhere.
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There is a budget coming up very soon and a General Election in less than 2 years, so, I suspect that this is the BBC and others churning out a press release from the Treasury to make us feel warm and fuzzy about the Government.
Whether these beds and ambulances will actually be delivered is another matter. It is unlikely that the BBC will monitor progress.
With the Tories festering in their own filth and the government rotting away, led by a rich man wholly incapable of managing this horde of hogs scrabbling to get noses in the trough, the BBC and the media are trailing the return of the saviour – THE GREAT BOZZA. We are to,d how he forced the Germans to send tanks to Ukraine, how Putin tried to threaten him and, of course, the proles oop north just lurv him.
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Looks very much like they are now building it up for selling off – especially since they are not offering to settle the strikes.
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I note from his article on the BBC News website today that the BBC’s Health Correspondent, Nick Triggle continues to ‘shield” England’s public from the true state of waiting times in NHS England’s Emergency Departments. Why?
He has a graph which shows performances of more than 60% of patients seen within the 4 hour target. This despite the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) reporting the following on the December 2022 performance (the latest published):
‘Four-hour performance at major Emergency Departments was 49.6%, this is the worst four-hour performance on record. This is a 4.9 percentage point decrease from the previous month, and 11.6 percentage point decrease from December 2021 (61.2%)’.
One might have thought that the occasion of falling below 50% would have been remarked upon in some way by the corporate media and the BBC. Anyone spot news coverage: anyone spot ‘scandal’, ‘crisis’, ‘minister must resign’ headlines? In Scotland by contrast, the BBC has even been known to have given headline billing to ‘the second worst’ performance and it regularly amplifies the outraged cries of our very own ministerial scalp hunters, Dr Gulhane and Ms Baillie.
The BBC News site’s Scotland section published an article on 10 January under this headline: ‘A&E patients waiting more than 12 hours hits record high’. It reported on recent A&E waiting times performance against the 4-hour standard stating: ‘The Public Health Scotland data shows 56% of A&E patients in Scotland were seen within the government’s four-hour target.’
See how easy it is to deceive? Anyone taking BBC reporting at face value would be forgiven for concluding that waiting times performance at Emergency Departments in England (over 60% according to Mr Triggle today) is similar to if not substantially better than the performance in Scotland!
It most definitely is not. Dr Adrian Boyle, President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine in giving evidence to a House of Lords Committee recently referred to NHS England’s categories of emergency provision: he described England’s Type 1 departments as ‘what you and everyone recognise as the major emergency departments’ – except that is the BBC (and recently ITV and C4 News too)!
See https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/11489/html/
By including Types 1, 2 and 3 departments in his statistic, Mr Triggle is lumping together a type of facility that only achieved 49.6% of patients transferred, discharged or admitted with 4 hours in December with a type of facility (Type 2) that achieved 96.6% and one (Type 3) that achieved 89.8%. The size of these differences between the Types 1s and the others point to Mr Triggle lumping buns and elephants together for a purpose that – whatever it might be – is definitely NOT to fully inform his readers! Why?
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The NHS needs £10billion. Underfunded for over five years. Before COVID. The Tories cut funding, instead of increasing it. Wages have been cut in real terms.
The Tories spent £918Billion
2019/20 but will not fund the NHS properly. £125Billion on the NHS. Wasted £Billion on PPE £15Billion+. On non scrutinised, illegal contracts for their associates. Funding the Tory Party with public monies and donations. Totally illegal.
Pay the workers the remuneration they deserve and fund the NHS properly.
The Scottish Gov has to mitigate the cuts, with the Scottish funds cut. Brexit is losing Scotland £Billions which could have funded essential services properly, without Westminster gross interference.
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