More critical care beds are needed in UK

London: The United Kingdom has one of the lowest ratios of critical care beds in the developed world, according to a review that warns the need for intensive and high-dependency beds is going to soar.

Last year's feared flu pandemic could have stretched capacity in the NHS to its limit but fewer people were taken severely ill than feared. Even so, doctors say critical beds are normally 80 per cent to 85 per cent full, which could mean some people missing out in an emergency.

Specialised care

The review, published in the Lancet medical journal, says the need for specialised hospital care will rise because of the ageing population, as well as increasing in the event of a disaster. The UK has 3.5 beds per 100,000 people, which is at the bottom end of the scale for developed countries. Germany has 24.6 per 100,000 and the US has 20 per 100,000, though not every country defines critical care in the same way.

Dr Gordon Rubenfeld of the department of critical care medicine at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, Canada, lead author of the first paper in a Lancet series, said: "It is clear that the UK is at the low end of ICU bed capacity and thus would have decreased ability to cope with a large-scale disaster with many critically injured casualties."

The paper adds that demographics pose a problem for wealthier nations like the UK, where older people will increasingly be admitted to critical care and recover as medicine and technology improve.

"The combination of an ageing population and fewer young wage earners in developed countries will create a demand for critical care that cannot be fulfilled as it is presently delivered, even if shrinking economies recover," the authors write.

Kevin Gunning, a consultant at Addenbrooke's hospital in Cambridge, who is a member of the council of the Intensive Care Society, said that a crisis in the hard winter of 2000, when hospitals suffered a shortage of critical care beds, led to the government investing significantly more money mostly in high-dependency beds, where patients are not on a ventilator, rather than intensive care. But critical care beds in the NHS were at 80 to 85 per cent occupancy, he said.