NHS Will Buy Beds In Care Homes To Cut Hospital Waits, Says Labour

NHS money will be used to buy thousands of beds in care homes to reduce overcrowding in hospitals, long waits in A&E and the number of patients becoming trapped in ambulances, under Labour plans.

- Denis Campbell

Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, said the move would tackle the huge human and financial "waste" of bed blocking in England. There are 13,000 beds in England enough to fill 26 hospitals - being occupied by patients fit to leave but stuck there because a lack of care outside the hospital means they cannot be discharged.

If Labour wins the general election on 4 July it will put some of the NHS's £165bn budget into the plan as one of a series of immediate changes intended to relieve the crisis in the health service.

Streeting made clear in a speech that a Labour government would expect hospitals across England to follow the example of Leeds teaching hospitals NHS trust, which spends £9m a year buying care home beds to free up hospital beds.

That initiative which it launched as a way of avoiding a "winter crisis" in 2022-23 - has freed up 165 beds, helped reduce the number of patients who are admitted avoidably and saved the trust between £17m and £23m, it has estimated.

"We will learn from the great innovations already happening in the health service like this, and take the best of the NHS to the rest of the NHS," said Streeting, who cited the Leeds approach as a model to follow when speaking to members of the Medical Journalists' Association.