Redistribution under New Labour

[Keaney Michael <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

New hospital with too few beds 'grossly inadequate'

Sarah Boseley, health editor
Thursday July 12, 2001
The Guardian

A new NHS hospital, built with private finance at a cost of £76m, is 54 beds
short of the number it needs just 14 weeks after it
opened, it emerged yesterday.

North Durham healthcare trust said the bed shortage at the University of
North Durham hospital was temporary, caused by the
difficulties in moving elderly patients in to residential nursing care.

In Durham, as elsewhere in the country, there are not enough places in care
homes for all the elderly people needing them. But the
trust's chairman, Kevin Earley, admitted he would have liked the hospital to
have had 20 or 30 extra beds.

"If I had them life would be a bit easier, but we would still be full. We
decided we could operate with fewer beds. What we have now
is a blockage with placing people in care - that was probably a mistake."

Durham county council's social services had been put under additional
pressure to find places for those patients who should have
been leaving hospital but who still needed care, he said. "We should put
more money into residential nursing care, I would argue,"
he said.

The University of North Durham hospital has 454 beds, and replaced Dryburn
hospital which had 665. Mr Earley said that the new
hospital was far better than the old despite the smaller capacity.

"This is a glorious improvement on the crumbling, dowdy building we had - an
absolutely huge leap in healthcare."

But the bed shortage so early in the life of a new hospital was seized on as
an illustration of the folly of relying upon private finance
to build a public sector hospital.

Robin Moss, Unison's head of health in the north, said: "It is sad that
within weeks the new hospital, which the people of Durham
had been waiting 50 years for, has been revealed as grossly inadequate to
serve the purposes it was designed for.

"Had the new hospital been built with public money it would have had more
beds, more nurses and been built three years earlier."

Unison claims people have waited in casualty for 12 hours. Mr Earley denied
it, but admitted patients had been waiting "too long"
and said £500,000 had been set aside to tackle the problem by employing more
staff.

He said Unison's criticism was bad for morale of staff and patients: "I'm
appalled they want to keep doing this as a political
campaign."

Full article at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4220268,00.html

Michael Keaney
Mercuria Business School
Martinlaaksontie 36
01620 Vantaa
Finland

michael.keaney@xxxxxx