Can you save 5,000 NHS hospital bed-days?

There is a clear ambition for the future of the NHS: shifting care left, caring for more people at home and in communities, and moving resources downstream from acute services. However demand for hospital care remains high – June, July, August, and September 2025 saw the highest number of A&E attendances on record for each of these respective months and responding to this can seem like an all-consuming affair. As a result the “left shift” risks being not so much an ambition as a pipedream. This doesn’t need to be the case, and IMPOWER have a proven track record of helping clients to deliver on that ambition.

If your hospital can remove 5,000 bed-days’ worth of demand before the end of March, then you will have freed up a ward’s worth of capacity, releasing an annualised £2 million, a conservative estimate, through savings or in costs avoided.

There is a strong case to recycle these savings into community-based services and standing up more resources outside the hospital. For example creating a highly impactful virtual ward, complete with five days of secondary care consultant cover will probably cost about £2million.

So how can you take out 5,000 bed-days’ worth of demand? By resetting the behaviours of your clinical teams, giving them the skills and confidence to work differently. At IMPOWER we have the tools and expertise to deliver this with you, and can show you results in six weeks.

There are broadly four steps you need to take:

1. Observe and understand the current behaviours and the impact they have. For example is there a culture of just keeping patients in hospital for a few more days, just to be safe?
2. Prioritise behavioural interventions. Frontline teams are time poor, so you can only really expect that they will engage with a maximum of three interventions. Prioritise change initiatives based on your observations and where you think you’ll have the biggest impact.
3. Secure alignment with your partners on a shared ambition. You need other system players to be on board so that they commit to trialling new ways of working. This will require the personal intervention of senior leaders to build trust and create the permission for their teams to engage.
4. Monitor progress with a small set of key metrics. You need just the right amount of data to make agile decisions. If an initiative is clearly working then plan to scale, if it isn’t, then stop.

These recommended actions are all practical and deliverable now. IMPOWER’s urgent and emergency care (UEC) improvement work has delivered an average 2-day length of stay (LOS) reduction by being laser-focused on setting positive behaviours. This work is hard, and it requires leadership at every level, but it is successful and you can start it now.

If you want to find 5,000 bed-days then get in touch. Contact Oliver Barnes at [email protected].