Coronavirus: Hospitals

Question

The Government has taken a number of actions to ensure the National Health Service has sufficient hospital capacity to care for COVID-19 patients, including:

- in order to plan for reasonable worst-case scenarios, we have opened a number of Nightingale hospitals across England, which will provide thousands of extra beds if local services need them as a result of the virus;

- the NHS has created extra capacity of 33,000 additional beds freed up across NHS hospitals – the equivalent of building 50 district general hospitals - plus 8,000 beds through an unprecedented deal with the independent sector;

- in addition, since February the Government has been running a new capital facility to provide additional funding to NHS organisations, where needed for any urgent building works linked to the coronavirus response; and

- this is on top of the 40 new hospitals and 20 hospital upgrades the Government announced as part of the Health Infrastructure Plan – which we are continuing to deliver and committed to doing so as soon as possible.