Fears West Middlesex Hospital could lose more than 100 beds (From This Is Local London)

It's very obvious that West Middlesex is short of beds and needs extra beds not less.

It's delusional to think there needs to be less beds when the population is increasing rapidly in London and life expectancy is also increasing at a similarly fast rate.

The only way they will be able to do it is by denying people care they ought to be receiving - like cataract surgery - thereby significantly reducing the quality of care.

Within the local NHS bodies there is a democratic deficit where no one really knows what they are up to nor know what treatments and drugs are being denied.

When I visited hospitals in Germany everything is done so much better and really shows how healthcare is cruely rationed in the UK.

I agree with Twickenham Bob, we have suddenly reached a stage where Clinical Commissioning Groups ('CCGs') are getting together to make decisions yet there's absolutely no transparency and a there's a complete democratic deficit - no one knows what's happening.

The Liberal Democrats promised us that councillors would be part of the CCGs but that's seems to be just another one of their promises.

As far as I know, the main CCG constituents are consultants from McKinsey and Price Waterhouse looking to save money.

It really doesn't look good, it's worse than Thatcher's dark days with the NHS. The dreadful coalition don't give a **** they're destroying everything important and they don't even have a mandate.

I am fascinated by Twickenham Bob's ascertion ' it's obvious'. I had a knee operation at West Mid about four years ago, it was under day surgery, a specialised area and this is not a general ward as we know it, and I was keen to be out as all patients in for surgery are screened for MRSA days before surgery. Personally I would prefer to be in and out and back home with care there as it is excellently provided through the partnerships, although on the decrease I have seen the consequences of this, even going back as far as when I was ten years old and my grandmother saying she wished she never had the cancer operation when she caught a post-operative infection, it also happened with my sister-in-law's father where the same thing happened.

Besides which although it may be ok but hospital food hardly compares with home does it?

Isn't cataract removal a day procedure too, my mother had it done recently and she was in just for the day, as others I know are - so that again is not about using general wards, but making it as convenient as possible and having after-care at home, this is specially provided for all as needed. Not sure if this is a political posture or based on facts, just asking the question, open to correction....of course we can always pour more and more into the bottomless pit of health services, the question is how to deliver quality care and be responsible with money, we have all heard of the burgeoning non-clinical head count that grew out of proportion to the outcomes during past Government's tenancy. Now doesn't health care change over time, better techniques, better results, advances in medical and surgical science, always the cry of 'we cannot change that just because it has always been that way'? Anyhow the NHS coming together with the Council bringing together our services is a very welcome use of combining thinking heads and resource and has just happened here in our Borough.

The Times, May 2012 put the NHS pension liability at £257,700,000,000.

We can't afford the staff pensions, let alone the beds!!

Scott its noticeable you describe the NHS as a bottomless pit. Is looking after ill people as worthless and chucking money into a hole in the ground?

The truth if the matter is that the NHS is being cut back as the population is growing and acing so only raising funding by consumer prices (not medical prices!) means less money per capita being spent.

Eye ops are a good example - of the new era of Tory NHS Rationing & Tory Postcode Lottery. The level of vision loss now has to be higher before patients can get treatment and oh - in most areas they will only mend one (refusing to operate on a second eye later on).

Lack of beds is also a real problem - I know of one person recently who was having a heart problem - but they had to turn the ambulance away as they had no doctors with enough experience to treat the patient as it was a weekend - lack of beds means lack of flexibility (extremely important for a hospital with and an emergency department) and a lack of depth in the clinical experience and expertise. The heart patient had to to bumped off to Hammersmith Hospital (Ealing).

Take knee operations - if West Mid only only did day surgery on knees it loses the ability to do emergency and trauma work on knees such as when a patient presents with say a knee infection. At the moment they tend to bump the case up to Charring Cross (Hammersmith).

Yes some day surgery can be done but that requires the patient to have someone able to look after them. If you are middle class and well off that's OK, but many people have taken Norman Tebbits bike to find work and don't live near home, or their children have moved away due to high house prices.

I personally know a number I doctors at West Middlesex and they all state it's bursting a the seams and relies on staff working overtime and well over the call of duty to stop the whole thing unravelling.

The lack of beds at West Middlesex means that at the present time is not really a full acute hospital - as it can't deal with many cases itself with inpatients being shipped to other hospitals for tests and the shipped back (cardio is particularly bad for that at West Mid) - and stripping out more will result in it becoming a minor non-acute hospital and the likely closure of the accident and emergency department.