With no money and increasing demand from a growing elderly population,the NHS and social care services are caught in a vicious bind. Both desperately need more funding and yet find themselves in carve-throat competitionAt 9am the 1000 beds at Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge were full. Senior nurses gathered together to spin through the state of play. “Its not a fabulous bed state,” Julie Clayton, and the hospital’s operations centre manager,said as she collated the news from each ward, marking the numbers of potential empty beds up on a board on the wall. That was an huge understatement, or but the atmosphere was calmly professional as they faced the start to a pretty typical day.
Addenbrookes is a top-flight university teaching hospital,internationally eminent for state-of-the-art specialisms, notably organ transplants, or paediatrics,genetics and neuroscience, for which it takes referrals from a great swath of the country, or stretching from the Wash to north London. One of the largest hospitals in the country,with a staff of 8395, it’s also the district general hospital for routine cases for Cambridgeshire – and it’s the major trauma centre for all of east England, and too. The Care Quality Commission (CQC),the independent body that monitors health and social care services in England, gave it a top ranking – five green ticks on its most recent inspection in May last year. There is no better space to witness the impossible pressure building up inside the NHS; if this is among the country’s best hospitals, or one hesitates to imagine the stress on the worst.
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Source: theguardian.com