Our Emergency Bed Service helps NHS healthcare professionals
find hospital beds for seriously-ill patients.
We arrange for around 10,000 patients to be
admitted to hospital or transferred between hospitals every
year.
We also provide a number of other
services.
We can:
Helping to get patients admitted to hospital
We can help London GPs to make arrangements
for seriously ill patients to be admitted to hospital. We take
case histories, clinical details, and notes on the patient’s
circumstances before negotiating with hospital bed managers or
on-call specialists to find an appropriate bed.
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Providing advice on the availability of intensive care
beds
We collect information on the availability of
intensive care beds for adults and children across three-quarters
of England.
We contact intensive care units several times
a day to determine their capacity. Using this information we can
direct hospital-based clinicians to the nearest available intensive
care bed for their patient.
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Arranging hospital transfers for new-born
babies
We coordinate the service that transfers
new-born babies (neonates) between hospitals in London, Kent,
Surrey and Sussex.
By monitoring the availability of neonatal
intensive care cots, we are able to identify a suitable cot for a
sick baby and arrange for one of the Neonatal Transfer Service’s
transport teams to transfer the baby between hospitals.
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Providing advice on the availability of children’s beds
and cubicles
We monitor which hospitals in and beyond
London have paediatric beds and cubicles available, and can help
clinicians find beds when their children’s wards are full.
Demand for this service tends to be high in
November and December when there is an increase in conditions such
as bronchitis and pneumonia amongst children.
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Identifying local mental health units
We can provide health professionals with
information about the units available for mental health patients in
their local area.
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Keeping hospitals and health organisations informed
during major incidents
We alert key health agencies in London when a
major incident is declared.
During the incident we collate information
about the casualties that have been treated by our ambulance
staff—this includes numbers and the types of injuries patients have
suffered. We then pass this information on to hospitals, specialist
units and other relevant organisations.
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Providing information about MedicAlert
patients
MedicAlert is a charity helping
people with hidden conditions or allergies. All members wear a
bracelet or necklace marked with an identification number and
emergency telephone number.
We keep the records of all MedicAlert patients
in the UK. In the event of an emergency, a healthcare professional
ringing the number on the patient’s bracelet or necklace will come
through to us and we will be able to provide details about the
patient’s health background, allergies or condition.
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