WORCESTERSHIRE'S hospitals do not have enough beds to cope in a medical emergency, an MP and health expert claims.
Dr Richard Taylor, MP for Wyre Forest who was elected after campaigning against the downgrading of Kidderminster Hospital, spoke out yesterday after operations had to be cancelled at county hospitals following an influx of sick patients.
Dr Taylor said Worcestershire Royal Hospital is running too close to capacity to be able to deal with such a medical emergency, and stressed that sending extra patients to Kidderminster - as happened last week - is not the answer.
"We know that to retain enough spaces for emergency admissions, an acute hospital should run with a bed occupancy rate of around 85 per cent," he said.
"The hospital in Worcester runs with an occupancy rate pretty consistently above 90 per cent. So we know they run things pretty tightly.
"This week's events show really that with this continued high occupancy, we can't cope with a sudden influx of emergency admissions like this. There are not enough acute beds to deal with the tremendous rush of patients we have seen this winter."
While he agreed an increase in the number of beds would be welcome, Dr Taylor said it was also important to try and reduce the number of people attending the county's accident and emergency wards.
"The answer is not just more beds," he said. "It's the whole combination of better care in the community and treating people in more appropriate places than A&E wards.
"But if the mechanisms to prevent unnecessary admissions were operating at 100 per cent efficiency and the hospital still didn't have enough beds, then they have to have some way of opening more beds in a crisis.
"It's not right to use beds in Kidderminster as an overflow. We lost 192 acute beds when Kidderminster's hospital was downgraded. The reason given for downgrading Kidderminster was to make sure emergency admissions did not interfere with operations there."
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