Understanding patient flow in hospitals With performance falling below targets and winter approaching, a Nuffield Trust briefing today warns the NHS can no longer find enough bed space to move patients through hospitals quickly and meet key A&E targets – and that its practice of counting patients at midnight means we are missing the true scale of the squeeze.
Understanding patient flow in hospitals, a briefing for NHS managers, estimates that 5.5% of beds need to be free for cleaning and preparation if patients are to be moved through quickly enough to meet the high-profile commitment to admit or transfer emergency patients within four hours. Yet many hospitals are unable to provide this much of the time, making target breaches inevitable. With a growing number of patients coming and going during the day, counting bed occupancy at midnight means that crunch times are often invisible. The Nuffield Trust
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