The number of hospital beds in the United Kingdom has undergone a decline since the year 2000. Whereas in 2000, there were around 240 thousand beds in the UK, by 2020 this figure was approximately 163 thousand. This means over this period there were over 80 thousand fewer hospital beds in the UK. However in the recent years since 2020, the number of hospital beds have been increasing, the first time in the recorded time period.

Fewer beds but admissions are still high

There were almost 16.4 million admissions to hospital between April 2022 to March 2023 in England. The number of admissions has recovered somewhat since the drop in year 2020/21. The busiest hospital trust in England by admissions in the year 2022/23 was the University Hospitals Birmingham Foundation Trust with over 333 thousand admissions. The average length of stay in hospitals in the UK in 2021 for acute care was seven days.

Accident and Emergency

In the first quarter of 2023/24, A&E in England received around 6.5 million attendees. The number of attendances has been creeping upwards since 2012. Around 2.4 percent of people attending A&E in the last year were diagnosed with an upper respiratory condition, followed by 1.8 percent with a lower respiratory tract infection.

United Kingdom UK: Hospital Beds: per 1000 People data was reported at 2.900 Number in 2011. This records a decrease from the previous number of 2.980 Number for 2010. United Kingdom UK: Hospital Beds: per 1000 People data is updated yearly, averaging 4.600 Number from Dec 1960 (Median) to 2011, with 23 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 10.700 Number in 1960 and a record low of 2.900 Number in 2011. United Kingdom UK: Hospital Beds: per 1000 People data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by World Bank. The data is categorized under Global Database’s United Kingdom – Table UK.World Bank.WDI: Health Statistics. Hospital beds include inpatient beds available in public, private, general, and specialized hospitals and rehabilitation centers. In most cases beds for both acute and chronic care are included.; ; Data are from the World Health Organization, supplemented by country data.; Weighted average;

The number of available hospital beds in NHS England decreased overall in the recorded time period, reaching a low of 118,473 in 2020/21. The number of hospital beds has since increased to pre-pandemic levels and shows the first signs of growing.

Hospital Beds in the United Kingdom remained unchanged at 2.44 per 1000 people in 2023 from 2.44 per 1000 people in 2022. This dataset includes a chart with historical data for the United Kingdom Hospital Beds.

Forecast: Number of Hospital Beds in Publicly Owned Hospitals in the UK 2024 - 2028 Discover more data with ReportLinker!

On March 31, 2024, there were 50 critical care (CC) beds in England occupied with patients who had tested positive for COVID-19. The number of critical care beds occupied with COVID patients peaked in England on January 22, 2021 when 4,096 patients required critical care treatment. For further information about the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, please visit our dedicated Facts and Figures page.

Forecast: Number of Hospital Beds in the UK 2024 - 2028 Discover more data with ReportLinker!

This data package contains the hospital bed availability and occupancy data by consultant main specialty and sector as well as data on inpatient and outpatient related hospital activity in England. It also contains information on Sub-Saharan public hospitals.

Average daily number of available and occupied beds by sector, NHS organisations in England

Source: Department of Health (DoH)

Publisher: Department of Health

Geographies: Primary Care Trust (PCT), Strategic Health Authority (SHA)

Geographic coverage: England

Time coverage: 2000-2001 to 2007-2008

Type of data: Administrative data

Forecast: Number of Hospital Beds in the UK 2022 - 2026 Discover more data with ReportLinker!

European Available Beds in Hospitals Share by Country (Units (Hospital Beds)), 2023 Discover more data with ReportLinker!

Hospital services are currently being stretched at the seams as they struggle to navigate financial constraints and workforce shortages while appointment waiting times remain high. Hospitals faced unrivalled pressure during the COVID-19 outbreak and this necessitated the release of significant government funding to help hospitals boost their capacity to treat afflicted patients. According to the King’s Fund, NHS funding rose from £148.9 billion in 2019-20 to £191 billion in 2020-21. Hospitals are still facing long elective backlogs, growing by around 100,000 cases monthly, according to the BMA. Over the five years through 2024-25, industry revenue is therefore expected to marginally rise at a compound annual rate of 0.2% to reach £115.1 billion. Hospitals are contending with stagnant real-term funding growth, exacerbated by inflationary pressures in the three years through 2024-25 and increasing demand for healthcare services due to a growing and ageing population. NHS England has a planned 2024-25 budget of £165 billion in real terms, which is only a 0.2% rise on 2023-24. In March 2025, the government announced plans to abolish NHS England, in a move to remove administrative hurdles it feels are preventing improvements in the hospital sector. Hospitals have been pressured to manage costs while dealing with a workforce crisis, highlighted by dependency on temporary staff to maintain safe staffing levels. Public healthcare budgets have failed to keep pace with soaring demand. Hospitals are struggling to match pre-COVID-19 activity levels, which has boosted demand for private hospitals as more patients seek private treatment. As a result, industry revenue is projected to grow by 0.9% in 2024-25. Revenue is estimated to climb at a compound annual rate of 2.3% over the five years through 2029-30 to £128.7 billion. Hospitals’ performance will depend on how much funding is available for an already over-burdened institution. The Labour government’s plan for hospitals over the next decade will be released in spring 2025 which will determine what resources are at the industry’s disposal in the coming years. With workforce shortages projected to worsen without substantial investments in training and recruitment, hospitals will need a plan to build a sustainable long-term staffing model. Dependency on international recruitment will become more of a challenge as global healthcare systems grapple with their own workforce shortages. Embracing technological advancements and digitisation like virtual wards will be key to improving efficiency and patient care, with planned capital funding aimed at transforming medical technology.

The number of psychiatric care beds in the United Kingdom increased by 969 (+4.25 percent) in 2022 in comparison to the previous year. In total, the number of psychiatric care beds amounted to 23,782 in 2022. Find more statistics on other topics about the United Kingdom with key insights such as number of specialist surgeons and number of students who graduated as midwives.

This publication reports on Admitted Patient Care activity in England for the financial year 2023-24. This report includes but is not limited to analysis of hospital episodes by patient demographics, diagnoses, external causes/injuries, operations, bed days, admission method, time waited, specialty, provider level analysis and Adult Critical Care (ACC). It describes NHS Admitted Patient Care Activity, Adult Critical Care activity and performance in hospitals in England. The purpose of this publication is to inform and support strategic and policy-led processes for the benefit of patient care and may also be of interest to researchers, journalists and members of the public interested in NHS hospital activity in England. The data source for this publication is Hospital Episode Statistics (HES). It contains final data and replaces the provisional data that are released each month. HES contains records of all admissions, appointments and attendances at NHS-commissioned hospital services in England. The HES data used in this publication are called 'Finished Consultant Episodes', and each episode relates to a period of care for a patient under a single consultant at a single hospital. Therefore, this report counts the number of episodes of care for admitted patients rather than the number of patients. This publication shows the number of episodes during the period, with breakdowns including by patient's age, gender, diagnosis, procedure involved and by provider. Please send queries or feedback via email to enquiries@nhsdigital.nhs.uk. Author: Secondary Care Open Data and Publications, NHS England. Lead Analyst: Karl Eichler

In 2023, patients in England were asked how they felt about the length of time they had waited in an NHS hospital before getting a bed in a ward. According to the results, *************** of respondents felt that they did not have to wait too long or at all to get a bed in a ward. This statistic shows the patients' opinion about the waiting time spent in hospital to get a bed in NHS in England in 2023.

OMOP dataset: Hospital COVID patients: severity, acuity, therapies, outcomes Dataset number 2.0

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was identified in January 2020. Currently, there have been more than 6 million cases & more than 1.5 million deaths worldwide. Some individuals experience severe manifestations of infection, including viral pneumonia, adult respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) & death. There is a pressing need for tools to stratify patients, to identify those at greatest risk. Acuity scores are composite scores which help identify patients who are more unwell to support & prioritise clinical care. There are no validated acuity scores for COVID-19 & it is unclear whether standard tools are accurate enough to provide this support. This secondary care COVID OMOP dataset contains granular demographic, morbidity, serial acuity and outcome data to inform risk prediction tools in COVID-19.

PIONEER geography The West Midlands (WM) has a population of 5.9 million & includes a diverse ethnic & socio-economic mix. There is a higher than average percentage of minority ethnic groups. WM has a large number of elderly residents but is the youngest population in the UK. Each day >100,000 people are treated in hospital, see their GP or are cared for by the NHS. The West Midlands was one of the hardest hit regions for COVID admissions in both wave 1 & 2.

EHR. University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB) is one of the largest NHS Trusts in England, providing direct acute services & specialist care across four hospital sites, with 2.2 million patient episodes per year, 2750 beds & 100 ITU beds. UHB runs a fully electronic healthcare record (EHR) (PICS; Birmingham Systems), a shared primary & secondary care record (Your Care Connected) & a patient portal “My Health”. UHB has cared for >5000 COVID admissions to date. This is a subset of data in OMOP format.

Scope: All COVID swab confirmed hospitalised patients to UHB from January – August 2020. The dataset includes highly granular patient demographics & co-morbidities taken from ICD-10 & SNOMED-CT codes. Serial, structured data pertaining to care process (timings, staff grades, specialty review, wards), presenting complaint, acuity, all physiology readings (pulse, blood pressure, respiratory rate, oxygen saturations), all blood results, microbiology, all prescribed & administered treatments (fluids, antibiotics, inotropes, vasopressors, organ support), all outcomes.

Available supplementary data: Health data preceding & following admission event. Matched “non-COVID” controls; ambulance, 111, 999 data, synthetic data. Further OMOP data available as an additional service.

Available supplementary support: Analytics, Model build, validation & refinement; A.I.; Data partner support for ETL (extract, transform & load) process, Clinical expertise, Patient & end-user access, Purchaser access, Regulatory requirements, Data-driven trials, “fast screen” services.

Description

The purpose of this initiative is to build an integrated dataset on Intensive Care Units (ICUs) and their availability by country and region (at the highest regional granularity provided by the sources), using a data model standardized across countries.

Currently, ICU data is stored in different country-specific sources, with a wide range of access points (national websites, APIs, excel or csv files, etc.)

Given current COVID-19 crisis, we believe that this information should be provided with the following: * common standardized structure * single point of access * open to the public

We hope that these datasets will further benefit researchers and help us in the fight against COVID-19.

Countries and sources:

• Italy (as of 2019 - source: Ministero della Salute)
• United Kingdom
  • England (as of 2020 - source: NHS England)
  • Wales (as of 2019 - source: StatsWales)
  • Scotland (as of 1998, projected on 2020 whole figure - sources: Scottish Health Directorate & Herald Scotland)
  • Northern Ireland (as of 2020, w/o sub-area granularity - source: Derry Journal)
• US (as of 2018 - source: Harvard Global Health Institute)
• Spain (as of 2013 - source: Medicina Intensiva)
• Germany (updated daily, not complete - source DIVI Intensiv Register)

Forecast: Psychiatric Care Beds in Hospitals in the UK 2024 - 2028 Discover more data with ReportLinker!

DECOVID, a multi-centre research consortium, was founded in March 2020 by two United Kingdom (UK) National Health Service (NHS) Foundation Trusts (comprising three acute care hospitals) and three research institutes/universities: University Hospitals Birmingham (UHB), University College London Hospitals (UCLH), University of Birmingham, University College London and The Alan Turing Institute. The original aim of DECOVID was to share harmonised electronic health record (EHR) data from UCLH and UHB to enable researchers affiliated with the DECOVID consortium to answer clinical questions to support the COVID-19 response.   ​​   ​​The DECOVID database has now been placed within the infrastructure of PIONEER, a Health Data Research (HDR) UK funded data hub that contains data from acute care providers, to make the DECOVID database accessible to external researchers not affiliated with the DECOVID consortium.  

This highly granular dataset contains 256,804 spells and 165,414 hospitalised patients. The data includes demographics, serial physiological measurements, laboratory test results, medications, procedures, drugs, mortality and readmission.

Geography: UHB is one of the largest NHS Trusts in England, providing direct acute services & specialist care across four hospital sites, with 2.2 million patient episodes per year, 2750 beds & > 120 ITU bed capacity. UCLH provides first-class acute and specialist services in six hospitals in central London, seeing more than 1 million outpatient and 100,000 admissions per year. Both UHB and UCLH have fully electronic health records. Data has been harmonised using the OMOP data model. Data set availability: Data access is available via the PIONEER Hub for projects which will benefit the public or patients. This can be by developing a new understanding of disease, by providing insights into how to improve care, or by developing new models, tools, treatments, or care processes. Data access can be provided to NHS, academic, commercial, policy and third sector organisations. Applications from SMEs are welcome. There is a single data access process, with public oversight provided by our public review committee, the Data Trust Committee. Contact pioneer@uhb.nhs.uk or visit www.pioneerdatahub.co.uk for more details.

Available supplementary data: Matched controls; ambulance and community data. Unstructured data (images). We can provide the dataset in other common data models and can build synthetic data to meet bespoke requirements.

Available supplementary support: Analytics, model build, validation & refinement; A.I. support. Data partner support for ETL (extract, transform & load) processes. Bespoke and “off the shelf” Trusted Research Environment (TRE) build and run. Consultancy with clinical, patient & end-user and purchaser access/ support. Support for regulatory requirements. Cohort discovery. Data-driven trials and “fast screen” services to assess population size.