A crisis-hit hospital is having to use “meeting rooms and storage space” for beds because it is unable to cope with the influx of patients, ministers have been told.
King’s College hospital, in Denmark Hill, has regularly been “more than 100 per cent full” and has consistently failed to hit the four-hour A&E and key cancer waiting time targets.
Last month its parent trust was placed in financial special measures and its chairman Lord Kerslake resigned after it ran up a £92 million deficit, said by regulators to be the fastest-growing in the NHS.
Helen Hayes, Labour MP for Dulwich and West Norwood, told a Commons debate last night that King’s — one of the capital’s four major trauma centres — had not been reimbursed by the Government for treating victims of the Grenfell Tower inferno or the Westminster and London Bridge terror attacks.
She said desperately overcrowded conditions last seen two decades ago, when “patients waited on trolleys in accident and emergency”, were once more happening on a regular basis. She said at one stage the trust was spending £1 million a month on a single firm of management consultants.
“I am concerned that, despite the incredibly hard work of the brilliant staff at King’s College hospital, that journey has come full circle — the days that we thought had been left behind at King’s have now returned,” she said. “The hospital is regularly more than 100 per cent full, with meeting rooms and storage space being used for beds.”
She added: “It cannot be right that, when King’s staff step up to the plate in response to terror attacks or the Grenfell Tower fire, there is no additional funding to cover the costs of the additional work.”
NHS figures show King’s College Hospital NHS Trust, which includes sister hospital Princess Royal in Orpington, ran out of adult critical care and paediatric intensive care beds on various days earlier this month.
On January 2 and 3, only one of more than 1,200 general and acute beds across the trust was unoccupied.
Princess Royal has been badly hit by norovirus, having to close beds and ban visitors.
MPs attributed the trust’s problems to its acquisition of Princess Royal and the failure of government funding to keep pace with rising patient demand.
Health minister Steve Barclay said trust bosses had failed for years to find recurrent savings or to improve medical productivity.
A trust spokesperson denied that storage areas had ever been used but acknowledged that a meeting room had on one occasion. It was, she added, "fully equipped, and safe for patient use".
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