Information about the Emergency Bed Service at London Ambulance Service.
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 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.
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.
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.
We arrange falls referrals for patients aged 65+ (or 50+ with some risk factors) who have had a mechanical fall but haven’t been conveyed to hospital. Across most of London these referrals are made to GPs but in several areas they are made directly into local falls services. A similar service is provided for hypoglycaemic patient who have not been conveyed.