The Royal Free Hospital

HOSPITAL managers are scouring the Royal Free Hospital for working beds while patients wait hours to be admitted in NHS “gridlock”.

Insiders have told the New Journal how a large number of broken beds was contributing to the current “traffic jam” of patients at the Royal Free which is, according to the most recent stats, 99 per cent full. Maintenance of beds, including rails and mechanisms, was provided in-house at the hospital in Pond Street until recently when it became outsourced to a medical supplies firm.

Meanwhile, internal critical incidents have been declared at the NHS trust with staff and equipment shortages, camouflage-jacketed armed forces being parachuted in to support ambulance handovers, and government ministers talking about introducing bulge wards in Portakabins to help the struggling A&E departments.

A healthcare worker source said: “The consequences of non-working beds is that patients can’t be admitted, procedures get delayed/cancelled. Right now it’s like a traffic jam of patients, but involving people and not cars.

“There are always plenty of mattresses but not – and this is the key – working beds. Before the beds would be repaired in-house. Now it’s a private contractor who comes in to repair them.”

The source said it was not uncommon for a whole ward’s worth of beds to be broken at any time, adding that even “suited and booted” hospital managers could now be seen searching all corners of the hospital for working beds, a task which was normally “left to the minions”.

The number of beds in the three hospitals serving Camden patients – the Royal Free, University College and Whittington – has been cut by a third in the past 12 years.

Shirley Franklin, who campaigned for more than a decade against cuts at the Whittington including the threatened closure of the A&E, said: “Let’s be clear, this is a government-created mess, not an NHS-created mess.

“It’s so ironic as more than 10 years ago they tried to close the A&E at the Whittington. We stopped them. But what they did succeed in doing was to close Chase Farm.

“There must be a spin-off from that closure. They shut down beds at that time too.”

That was part of a government policy to save the NHS money by pushing more “care in the community”, with patients being seen in their home or neighbour­hood setting.

The UK now has the second lowest rate of beds to 1,000 patients in Europe, behind Sweden. But the reality is that larger numbers of patients are coming to hospital than ever before.

UCL professor Sir Michael Marmot, who was recently knighted in the New Year’s honours, has led research showing a direct correlation between poverty and ill-health. Sickness is officially on the rise with more patients than ever showing up at A&Es – many seeing this as the quickest way of getting seen by an expert, despite the long waits stretching into hours.

The current health secretary, Steve Barclay, announced this week plans to pay for 2,500 beds in care homes so patients can be moved out of hospital quicker and said that Portakabins could be added to A&Es to increase capacity.

John Lister, from London Health Emergen­cy, said: “Why not invest in long-term expansion of capacity to cope with expanded population and with increased proportion and numbers of older people? And while we’re at it, why not invest to tackle £10bn-plus backlog maintenance? Symptoms of 12-year decline.”

Meanwhile, figures show more than a quarter of the 778 patients taken to the Royal Free hospital by ambulance in the first week of January waited more than an hour before getting admitted, while 44 per cent of handovers took longer than 30 minutes.

A Royal Free London spokesperson said: “Like all NHS hospitals, we are extremely busy and this winter there has been unprecedented demand for hospital beds. We work closely with our contractor to ensure that beds which require repair are fixed in a timely manner.”