Acute hospital bed provision
Bruton asks whether the Department has reviewed hospital-provision plans given a report’s finding that Ireland has 50% more acute beds than England and Wales. Desmond says the figures are familiar but warns that definitions may not be comparable.
asked the Minister for Health, in view of the National Economic and Social Council finding that acute hospital bed provision in Ireland is 50 per cent higher than in England and Wales, if his Department have reviewed their plans for hospital provision.
Comment on this
I presume the Deputy is referring to the National Economic and Social Council Report No. 73. entitled Health Services: The Implications of Demographic Change which contains international comparisons of acute hospital bed provision.
Table 4.2 of that report gives the number of acute hospital beds available per 1,000 population for a number of areas as follows:
Figures such as these have appeared in a number of publications and are of course, well known in the Department of Health. There is a problem of definition with these figures and it is probable that like is not always being compared with like. However, the broad thrust of the figures which show England and Wales with the lowest ratio of beds and the ratio for this country between those for Scotland and Northern Ireland is generally accepted as being true.
However, when viewed in a European context the number of beds in Ireland is quite low with only the UK and the Netherlands having a lower number of beds per head of population.
As indicated in the national plan. Building on Reality, it is an important objective of health policy to shift resources away from institutional services into community services and, in line with this policy, the scale of a number of acute hospital developments included in the plan has been reduced.
The whole question of hospital bed provision is, of course, kept under constant review in my Department.