Hospital beds... who needs 'em?
Discussion
Well, sick people, obviously, but how often?
The UK has 2.54 of them per 1,000 people. Latvia has just under twice as many, Belgium just over. Germany have over 3 times as many, whilst Japan and South Korea at the top of the list have over 5 times as many. Sweden, on the other hand, have even fewer than we do!
What's going on? I know the NHS gets bed shortages, but surely not that many? Have the Germans and Japanese got loads of empty beds? Then I always thought of Sweden as a high tax but high service sort of place...
Are there mitigating factors I don't know about?
The UK has 2.54 of them per 1,000 people. Latvia has just under twice as many, Belgium just over. Germany have over 3 times as many, whilst Japan and South Korea at the top of the list have over 5 times as many. Sweden, on the other hand, have even fewer than we do!
What's going on? I know the NHS gets bed shortages, but surely not that many? Have the Germans and Japanese got loads of empty beds? Then I always thought of Sweden as a high tax but high service sort of place...
Are there mitigating factors I don't know about?
The proplem with just stating the number of beds per head of population only tells us just that. It doesn't tell us anything about the actual care they get or the ratio of care staff per bed.
Many Soviet bloc countries had massive hospitals, wouldn't say the quality of care was very good.
Many Soviet bloc countries had massive hospitals, wouldn't say the quality of care was very good.
I don't know for certain, but it's possible because of the level of home nursing and care home nursing we have in the UK.
A decent amount of people are nursed and indeed die at home now, and it's not like they're in their normal bed with only a mercury thermometer and a pack of paracetamol for company either. Hospital style beds, special wound preventing mattresses that costs thousands and lots of bleeping equipment.
My Wife's old District Nursing Team is 10 strong (well, when 8 of them aren't either in hospital or isolating with Covid), they're one of 5-6 teams who cover our small city (pop around 300k) they will typically have 10 home visits a day each, some of those will be the same patient twice, or sometimes they go in pairs for different and often shady reasons. Most patients will only see them once a week, but others are multiple times a day so I wouldn't like to guess how many patients they have.
There are also 3-4 specialist teams so see people for things like Wounds, Incontinence etc, plus 3rd industry / charity providers who help with palliative care for people with Cancer etc.
That's just Registered Nurses, that doesn't include Health Care Assistants (aka non Registered Nurses) nor Team Leaders and Management etc.
A side note, there are LOTS and LOTS of hospital beds (not the actual beds, of which there are lots of spares in storage) but the wards/building they go in being built at the moment, for obviously reasons, I'm sure it's very reassuring for the public to know how quickly we've increased capacity. Sadly, it takes 7 years to train a Doctor, 3 years to train a Nurse and 1 year to Train a Health Care Assistant. Thanks to the combined efforts of austerity, Brexit and specifically the removal of Nursing Bursaries, it's proving very, very difficult to staff them. In fact the only way to staff them is to move staff from other wards, which means a lot of cancelled operations and clinics, which makes you wonder if we really needs those beds at all.
A decent amount of people are nursed and indeed die at home now, and it's not like they're in their normal bed with only a mercury thermometer and a pack of paracetamol for company either. Hospital style beds, special wound preventing mattresses that costs thousands and lots of bleeping equipment.
My Wife's old District Nursing Team is 10 strong (well, when 8 of them aren't either in hospital or isolating with Covid), they're one of 5-6 teams who cover our small city (pop around 300k) they will typically have 10 home visits a day each, some of those will be the same patient twice, or sometimes they go in pairs for different and often shady reasons. Most patients will only see them once a week, but others are multiple times a day so I wouldn't like to guess how many patients they have.
There are also 3-4 specialist teams so see people for things like Wounds, Incontinence etc, plus 3rd industry / charity providers who help with palliative care for people with Cancer etc.
That's just Registered Nurses, that doesn't include Health Care Assistants (aka non Registered Nurses) nor Team Leaders and Management etc.
A side note, there are LOTS and LOTS of hospital beds (not the actual beds, of which there are lots of spares in storage) but the wards/building they go in being built at the moment, for obviously reasons, I'm sure it's very reassuring for the public to know how quickly we've increased capacity. Sadly, it takes 7 years to train a Doctor, 3 years to train a Nurse and 1 year to Train a Health Care Assistant. Thanks to the combined efforts of austerity, Brexit and specifically the removal of Nursing Bursaries, it's proving very, very difficult to staff them. In fact the only way to staff them is to move staff from other wards, which means a lot of cancelled operations and clinics, which makes you wonder if we really needs those beds at all.
You get what you pay for. Unless you are the USA in which case they pay a lot for the nationalised side of their healthcare and it provides a third rate service.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunit...
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunit...
BlackLabel said:
You get what you pay for. Unless you are the USA in which case they pay a lot for the nationalised side of their healthcare and it provides a third rate service.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunit...
You might get what you pay for but I imagine we have fewer beds per head of population than many of those who spend less.https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunit...
As a metric on its own though it is fairly meaningless. We have a large hospice sector in this country for example. I imagine they don't appear as hospital beds but the effect is the same.
Keyhole surgery, and other such advances, have also reduced the time needed to be in hospital.
Edited by JagLover on Friday 30th October 11:10
"The OECD said the overall reduction in hospital beds per capita "has been driven partly by progress in medical technology which has enabled a move to day surgery and a reduced need for hospitalisation"."
"An article in the British Medical Journal argued that mental health, learning disability and geriatric services had seen a more marked reduction in hospital beds because of the shift to community services."
https://fullfact.org/health/do-we-have-fewer-hospi...
When we are in the same ballpark as Sweden and Norway who are held up in some quarters models of good government and prosperous equal societies there probably isn't a huge problem.
"An article in the British Medical Journal argued that mental health, learning disability and geriatric services had seen a more marked reduction in hospital beds because of the shift to community services."
https://fullfact.org/health/do-we-have-fewer-hospi...
When we are in the same ballpark as Sweden and Norway who are held up in some quarters models of good government and prosperous equal societies there probably isn't a huge problem.
BlackLabel said:
You get what you pay for. Unless you are the USA in which case they pay a lot for the nationalised side of their healthcare and it provides a third rate service.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunit...
The medicare/medicaid bit is the relatively efficient bit; it's the private bit that inflates the numbers because of bills padded with unnecessary tests, price gouging, then there's overpriced drugs due to cartels and the the often shttps://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunit...
tty behaviour of the HMOs.JagLover said:
BlackLabel said:
You get what you pay for. Unless you are the USA in which case they pay a lot for the nationalised side of their healthcare and it provides a third rate service.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunit...
You might get what you pay for but I imagine we have fewer beds per head of population than many of those who spend less.https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunit...
As a metric on its own though it is fairly meaningless. We have a large hospice sector in this country for example. I imagine they don't appear as hospital beds but the effect is the same.
Keyhole surgery, and other such advances, have also reduced the time needed to be in hospital.
Edited by JagLover on Friday 30th October 11:10
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