Hospital bed closures dropped amid stresses the NHS staff crisis will worsen after Brexit

Plans to close hundreds of hospital beds in London have been largely abandoned due to unprecedented demand on the NHS.

Health chiefs are now trying to “do more with the same” as they contend with an ageing population, a £245 million black hole in hospital finances and a staff crisis potentially worsening after Brexit, a health think tank revealed. The King’s Fund study said the bed closure plans, which focused on south-west and north-west London, were seen as “unrealistic in the face of growing demand on services and population growth”.

Campaigners had feared dire consequences for hospitals such as St Helier in Carshalton, and Charing Cross in Hammersmith. A new hospital at Sutton remains an aspiration of Epsom and St Helier NHS trust but a wider reconfiguration has been ditched.

New A&E facilities are being built at Charing Cross Hospital and senior medics say closure is now “unthinkable” due to patient demand.

Today’s report was commissioned by Mayor Sadiq Khan to look into the effectiveness of the capital’s five sustainability and transformation partnerships (STPs). These were among 44 set up by the Government in 2015 to improve health and social care planning.

The report said London’s STPs became a “toxic brand” after adopting the inherited bed closure plans, and have been less effective than those elsewhere.

The capital’s “complex and cluttered” health and care system was hampering plans to improve the health of Londoners, the report said. It added: “One area where the partnerships have departed from their original plans is in relation to the proposed changes to hospital bed numbers. STPs said they now plan to manage demand within current bed capacity by transforming services to ‘do more with the same, rather than make absolute reductions’.”

The report also highlighted how London’s health and social care system is most at risk from a bad Brexit.

EU nationals make up 11.2 per cent of the capital’s NHS workforce, compared with 5.2 per cent nationally, and 13 per cent of social care posts, compared with seven per cent nationally.

Since the Brexit referendum, the number of EU nurses joining the NHS register has fallen by 87 per cent.

Anna Charles, one of the report’s authors, said London was “very exposed to the consequences of anything that would make the recruitment of [NHS and social care staff] drop sharply”.

The report suggests the Mayor, who has a strategic responsibility to tackle health inequalities but no direct role in providing health services, should encourage the STPs, the 33 local authorities and Public Health England to work together for the greater good.