NHS bosses reveal ‘hospital hotel’ plan at University College London Hospital
New rooms for cancer patients to keep costs down
Published: 18th November, 2010
by TOM FOOT
BOSSES at University College London Hospital are working on proposals to open a luxury hotel for cancer patients – because it’s cheaper than keeping them on wards overnight.
The Euston hospital has spent £1million of NHS funding over the past three years checking cancer treatment patients into the Radisson Edwardian Grafton Hotel in Tottenham Court Road.
Its £120-a-night room tariff is cheaper than the estimated £300-a-day cost to the NHS of keeping a patient in a UCH bed overnight.
Chief executive Sir Robert Naylor said: “We are working on a proposal to do that – a hospital hotel if you like. Running that kind of facility might be £90 a night rather than £120 a night. We’d have to set it up and provide staff, though, like a hotel would do.”
He said there “simply wasn’t space” to build a hotel or hostel inside a “highly sophisticated technical” hospital like UCH, which is designated by the government as a specialist acute hospital, meaning its main focus is on treating patients, not their recovery.
Those booking into the hospital hotels are mainly undergoing gruelling chemotherapy sessions – typically taking three to five days. They are hooked up with battery packs and stay overnight in rooms with emergency buttons.
One cancer patient told the New Journal: “It is a bit weird because you think, ‘why am I not in the hospital?’ On the first day, you are too tired but at the end of it you can use the facilities. For me, it worked really well – because my family could come and be with me.”
A UCH spokesman said: “A survey of cancer patients who use this facility was unanimously in favour of it as providing a better service than the alternative of hospital admission. Secondly, and more importantly, it has allowed us to subsequently increase the number of patients treated and reduce waiting lists to some of the lowest in the NHS.”
Keep Our NHS Public co-founder Professor Wendy Savage said: “This shows the folly of the PFI programme that a brand-new hospital does not have sufficient beds for the needs of its patients.”
But Conservative councillor Andrew Mennear welcomed the concept as a good example of how the private sector can do things more efficiently than the NHS.