How many hospital beds are there in the UK

Readers of our popular article How many hospitals in the UK have been asking for additional data relating to hospital bed numbers. In particular, how many hospital beds are there in the UK, how many beds per capita and the average number of beds per hospital.

To answer the first query of how many beds there are in total in the UK, we gathered data from several reputable sources [1] and used the most recent information available for each NHS Trust. In some cases, the data includes the increased capacity put in place to cope with the coronavirus crisis. The total number of hospital beds in the UK is 170,548, correct at the time of publishing this article in April 2020.

	Hospitals	Hospital beds	Population [2]
UK	1,257	170,548	66,435,000

To look more closely at this data, we also delved into how many hospital beds there were in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

UK region	Hospitals	Hospital beds
England	854	135,574
Scotland	279	20,553
Wales	83	10,562
Northern Ireland	41	3,879

As the map shows, England has the most hospital beds at 135,574, Scotland has the 2^nd most with 20,533. Wales has 10,562 hospital beds and Northern Ireland has 3,879.

Hospital beds per person

Some people are interested in how many hospital beds there are per person in the UK and in each region.

Using the UK data above, you can see that this equates to 1 hospital bed per 390 people in the UK, or 0.0026% of a bed per person!

Looking at the individual regions, again variety seems to be the spice of life. Northern Ireland has the least hospital beds per person, with only 1 bed for 485 people. Scotland has the most beds with 1 bed for every 265 people.

Average number of beds per hospital

From this data, we can calculate that the average number of beds in an average UK hospital (if there is such a thing!), is 136 beds per hospital. This figure varies considerably from region to region, with England having the most beds per hospital at 159 and Scotland having less than half this number at only 74.

UK region	Average beds per hospital
England	159
Scotland	74
Wales	127
Northern Ireland	95

This variation was outlined briefly in the How many hospitals in the UK article, which stated that the smaller number of hospitals per capita in England was explained by the fact that the hospitals in England are much larger. The higher number of hospitals per person in Scotland is due to there being many more, smaller hospitals to treat the more remote population, living across a much wider area.

Hospitals with the most beds

We were also interested to see which hospitals have the most beds. The following list shows the top 20 UK hospitals with the most hospital beds:

	UK hospital	Hospital beds
1.	Manchester Royal Infirmary	1,721
2.	Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, Glasgow	1,560
3.	Queens Medical Centre, Nottingham	1,300
4.	St George’s Hospital, London	1,300
5.	University Hospital Coventry	1,250
6.	Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital	1,237
7.	Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham	1,215
8.	Queen Alexandra Hospital, Portsmouth	1,200
9.	Royal Stoke Hospital	1,183
10.	Royal Derby Hospital	1,159
11.	Leeds General Infirmary	1,103
12.	Northern General Hospital, Sheffield	1,100
13.	University Hospital Southampton	1,100
14.	Addenbrookes Hospital, Cambridge	1,000
15.	Southmead Hospital Bristol	996
16.	Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh at Little France	992
17.	Sunderland Royal Hospital	970
18.	King’s College Hospital, London	950
19.	University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff	941
20.	Royal Free Hospital	900
20.	Derriford Hospital	900