.PERHAPS the most startling thing about the findings today of the National Beds Inquiry is not that the NHS has tens of thousands fewer than a decade ago - and too few overall - but that this kind of investigation had never been done before on a nationwide basis.

For, surely, it is an exercise that needs to be continually undertaken so that the best use is made of bed resources and they do not fall perilously short of demand, creating the sort of winter-time patients-stacked-on-trolleys traumas with which we have become too familiar.

Such instances have already demonstrated what was apparent - that the level of bed provision verges on the unsafe at times of crisis and at other times hardly assists the reduction of hospital waiting lists.

But this inquiry's systematic analysis of bed provision also underlines another fact.

This is that more needs to be spent on more beds and that existing ones must be better utilised.

The steep decline in hospital beds by 100,000 over the past 40 years and by 40,000 over the past decade can largely be attributed to advances in medical techniques that mean large numbers of people no longer need to spend days or weeks in hospital after operations.

But this downward trend must be reversed if there is also to be a halt to the sorry cycle of recent winters when hospital corridors are turned into makeshift wards, operations are cancelled and dangerously-ill people are shuttled to intensive care units at the other side of the country. Health Secretary Alan Milburn was today pledging himself to this - and, politically, the government needs to mend the damage to its commitment to the NHS caused by this year's flu crisis.

However, we need to be sure of the extent of the remedial action and of the bulging Treasury's support for it.

For in addition to the steps being outlined to unblock the large numbers of beds occupied by old people who do not need to remain in hospital - salvaging the old-style cottage hospital is one proposal for absorbing this pressure - there has been shown to be a clear need for new beds.

That, of course, also means more doctors and nurses and a pay and career structure to increase and maintain their numbers.

And if the unblocking of beds by the elderly - 20 per cent of whom are in the wrong type of ward at present - is to be truly accomplished, community care will also need a massive boost.

The real conclusion of this long overdue audit is that, if the inquiry's target of 4,000 extra beds is to be achieved, the Chancellor needs to dig deep into his election war chest to give much more to both the NHS and the local authority social services expected to cope with the elderly relocated from the wards.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.