NHS spent £10m relocating women and girls from hospitals in England since 2017, putting recovery at risk, say experts
- The mother whose daughter was sent 200 miles away for eating disorder treatment
A shortage of beds for severely unwell eating-disorder patients has forced the NHS to send more than 100 women from England to hospitals in Scotland for treatment since 2017.
The cost of relocating patients, which included under-18s, was more than £10m, with one patient staying more than a year in hospital, costing close to £250,000.
The cost of these placements, from April 2017 to December 2019, was £10.136m.
The maximum length of stay for a single patient in 2019 was 395 days, at a cost of £214,000. In previous years a patient stayed almost two years (639 days), costing £340,000.
The patients sent were all female and a number of them were under 18, although the exact number is unclear because the NHS withheld this information, saying it could allow the identification of patients.
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