§ Mr. ButlerTo ask the Secretary of State for Social Services what percentage of hospital beds were on average unoccupied in the Mersey regional health authority in(a) 1981 and (b) the latest available year.
§ Mrs. CurrieThe information requested is given in the table.
All National Health Service hospitals in Mersey region 1981 1986 Average daily number: Available beds 21,025 17,959 Occupied beds1 17,290 14,880 Percentage occupied beds 82.2 82.9 Percentage unoccupied beds 17.8 17.1 1 Bed occupancy figures are based on a midnight count and do not therefore reflect the use of beds by patients who do not stay overnight. The health services information steering group (chaired by Mrs. Körner) recommended in its first report that bed use data should include all patients using a ward in a 24-hour period and that aggregated bed occupancy statistics should not be used as an indicator of efficient bed use. A more useful measure of bed utilisation is patient throughput per available bed. For Mersey region this increased from 14.2 to 18.8 between 1981 and 1986.