19 November 2016
A&E
A patient waited almost two days on a trolley in one of London’s biggest A&E units because of a shortage of specialist beds, it was revealed today.
King’s College Hospital, in Denmark Hill, was forced to keep the patient in its casualty department for 45 hours 50 minutes because a delay in finding a bed in a specialist psychiatric unit.
It was one of 15 cases between April and June in which the hospital trust kept patients on a trolley for more than 12 hours. All 15 were mental health patients and the delays were caused by the shortage of psychiatric beds in other hospitals.
