Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many additional critical care beds the NHS has made available in (a) the North West, (b) Liverpool City Region, (c) Merseyside and (d) Wirral since the covid-19 outbreak.

The National Health Service is scaling up the number of intensive care beds. There are currently 3,771 critical care beds in the NHS in England. As part of the readiness for the likely influx of more COVID-19 patients, the NHS is taking concerted action to free up to a third of its 100,000 general and acute beds.

In addition, NHS England has agreed a major deal with the nation’s independent hospitals. The deal – the first of its kind ever - includes the provision of 8,000 hospital beds across England and nearly 1,200 more ventilators.

A new temporary hospital - the NHS Nightingale hospital – will open at the Excel Centre in London next week. It will have capacity for 4,000 people.

Two new temporary hospitals will be set up at Birmingham's NEC and the Manchester conference centre and will be ready next month.

The NHS is making sure that not just overall hospital beds but particularly intensive care beds, operating theatres, recovery bays being repurposed, mechanical ventilation and other facilities across the hospital sector are expanded to the greatest possible extent so that the NHS can do all it possibly can.

Data on the number of critical care beds made available in the North West, Liverpool City Region, Merseyside and Wirral since the COVID-19 outbreak is not currently available.