Hospital Beds

(asked on 15th December 2016) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what estimate his Department has made of the cost to the public purse of hospital care for in-patients who have no medical need for that care in 2016-17.


Answered by
Philip Dunne Portrait
Philip Dunne
This question was answered on 21st December 2016

No such assessment has been made.

However, as part of implementing Lord Carter’s recommendations on hospital productivity, ‘Operational productivity and performance in English NHS acute hospitals: Unwarranted variations’, NHS Improvement is leading work with providers to develop a richer dataset around all aspects of the patient pathway, including discharge.

NHS England is also leading activity to embed a minimum community dataset which will allow an accurate understanding of levels of activity within community health services, this will help enable a robust picture of costs and implications of delayed discharges to emerge. At the same time, the Department continues to work closely with the National Health Service and local government to help local areas improve transfers out of hospital, share best practice, and reduce unnecessary delays.

Reticulating Splines