DOCTORS want the closure of hospital beds in Scotland halted.
They say the ''inexorable'' rise in emergency acute admissions threatens both the quality of patient care and the ability of the NHS and its staff to respond to crisis.
The number of acute beds has fallen by a third over 25 years and more cuts were planned, whereas the number of emergency admissions has been rising steadily, from 3% a year in the 1980s to 4% and more in recent years.
More than 10,000 beds in any one day are likely to be occupied by emergency patients during the peak winter period, compared with fewer than 9500 in the early 1980s.
The latest report to highlight the crisis was published yesterday by a working party drawn from the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow.
As well as keeping beds open, their report also suggests improvements in organisation to meet the problem. They include closer integration of hospital services with community and social services to cut down the number of unnecessary admissions and speed the discharge of patients from hospital once their treatment has ended.
Other measures being suggested include an extension of the normal hours worked by diagnostic departments so that patients did not have to wait until the following day - if they were admitted at night or a public holiday - for their results to come back and treatment started.
The report also highlights growing professional problems affecting physicians because of the trend towards specialisation.
The report advocates the appointment by hospitals of a physician with special responsibility for acute general medicine, who would assess emergency cases for transfer to the appropriate specialists.
A spokesman for Scottish Health Minister Sam Galbraith said he had welcomed the report as a contribution to the debate about how best to deal with acute medical admissions; the Chief Medical Officer, Sir David Carter, would be taking the findings into account in his review of acute services.
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