Authors' figures were wrong for Edinburgh …

Editor—Allyson M Pollock and colleagues state that they had difficulty in obtaining business plans, planning documents, and accurate bed numbers from all the trusts that they looked at.1 None of the authors requested detailed information from the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh NHS Trust; had they done so the trust would have corrected several mistakes in their assumptions, in the data that they used, and therefore in their conclusions. The Lothian acute services strategy was published in 1992, before the government introduced the private finance initiative. The bed numbers in that strategy are consistent with those being planned today and reflect the closure of smaller hospitals. The authors are wrong to assert that the private sector planned the size of the hospital and that, had public sector finance been available, different planning guidelines would have been used that would have led to a larger hospital.

Table 1 provides the detailed bed numbers planned for the new Royal Infirmary. The article stated that bed numbers will drop from 1292 to 814 acute beds. The figure of 1292 overstates the current numbers by 156 (actual 1136). This overstatement is more dramatic because the authors omitted the Chalmers Hospital from the hospitals comprising the Royal Infirmary group. The current total of 1136 further falls to 1106 because of planned transfers of services to other trusts. Thus the true comparison is 1106 versus 869 acute beds. A further 30 hotel beds give a total of 899, a drop of 19%, not 37% as stated in the article. No private beds are planned, and inpatient activity is planned to rise by 12%, not fall by 28% as the article suggests.

The authors are wrong to suggest that the reconstruction of acute hospital services in Lothian was …