Report finds North has too many hospitals

A new report on transforming the North's health service has found that it has too many hospitals. The review, by former chief medical officer of England Sir Liam Donaldson, said the North's 10 acute hospitals could not carry out the level of care necessary to meet patients' needs.

He did not specify how many hospitals were needed in the North but cited a study which said four hospitals should be sufficient for the North’s 1.8 million people.

His review proposed that an impartial international team of experts be appointed to determine what form of health and social care services were required to deliver “world standards of care” in the North.

"A proportion of poor quality unsafe care occurs because local hospital facilities in some parts of Northern Ireland cannot provide the level and standard of care required to meet patients' needs 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“Proposals to close local hospitals tend to be met with public outrage but this would be turned on its head if it were properly explained that people were trading a degree of geographical inconvenience against life and death. Finding a solution should be above political self-interest.”

His review said the "whole of the United Kingdom, like most developed countries, has a fundamental problem: the health and social care system that it has is not the health and social care system that it needs. The pattern of ill-health in the population has changed substantially since the systems were founded, and the systems have not changed to keep up."

His review referred to the 2011 Transforming Your Care review which “established that Northern Ireland has too many acute hospitals – that elsewhere in the United Kingdom a population of 1.8 million people would likely be served by four acute hospitals – not the 10 that Northern Ireland had”.