ABSTRACT
The hospital bed has traditionally been considered a major ‘unit of currency’ within the NHS, in that the status of consultants was often perceived to be related to the number of beds that they could each claim to control. This chapter describes research into the process of bed management at three NHS Trusts. The main focus of the work was on University Hospitals Aintree Trust (AHNT) in Liverpool, and it is this hospital’s bed management system that is analysed in depth. This chapter describes the benchmarking of the bed management process. Benchmarking is ‘the search for industry best practices, which lead to superior performance’. Like AHNT, surgery and non-medical elective patients at both hospitals are called forward by consultants and the Bed Managers have no influence on their summoning. Patient buffers are good practice in bed management to reduce pressure points and bottlenecks in AED and the wards; but only AHNT operates a wide range of input and output buffers.
