BMJ  2007;335:535 (15 September), doi:10.1136/bmj.39335.652488.DB

News

Hospital closures: the great taboo

Nick Timmins

Financial Times

Closing a hospital always generates a public outcry, even if the evidence suggests that closure will improve services. Nicholas Timmins asks why it's so difficult

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The Tory MP Kenneth Clarke used to tell a story, when health minister back in the 1980s, of meeting his Italian counterpart, who complained vigorously about the difficulty of closing hospitals, when rationalisation of health services was badly needed in his own country.

"We don't have a problem," Ken chortled. "We just close them." And, at the simplest level, that is clearly true. In the United Kingdom numerous hospitals have closed or merged with their neighbours over the past 40 years. The exact number is hard to pin down because of the frequency of mergers. But the number of beds has certainly decreased: back in 1948, when the NHS was founded, the UK had around 550 000 beds; today the figure is half that, at around 228 000 in 2003-4.

True, the great bulk of that reduction is due to the closure of the old mental health asylums and the . . . [Full text of this article]


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