borrowed bed

An NHS term of art for bed(s) temporarily made available for use by another specialty/significant facility other than the specialty/significant facility to which they are normally allocated.

Types of bed borrowing:

• Bed borrowing for use
A bed borrowed on an individual basis, either to meet an immediate need for inpatient accommodation or to provide inpatient accommodation for specialties/significant facilities with a zero bed complement.
Examples:
(1) Outside of the main allocated inpatient areas for a particular consultant or specialty, and
(2) patients transferred to any non-inpatient bedded area (e.g., day units).

• Bed borrowing for availability
Beds borrowed in blocks to ensure accommodation during periods of upgrades and maintenance. The block of borrowed beds is available to the borrowing specialty but is not necessarily fully occupied.

• Bed borrowing between wards and/or consultants, as part of local bed management, which is not recorded nationally.

• Beds borrowed from another specialty or facility.

Mentioned in

References in periodicals archive

I slide back into my borrowed bed, knowing sleep may be an elusive fantasy not again realized until many, many hours from now.

No fear of flying

The results, classified by genre: romance for Leo and Brendan; burlesque for the disrupted men's group; farce for Leo's enchantingly flaming roommate (Tom Hollander), who has sex only in hastily borrowed beds; parody for Leo in his dreams (after he calms himself by reading Jane Austen at bedtime); and a touch of melodrama for the woman (Jennifer Ehle) who'd spent eight years living with Brendan.

Humiliation With a Smile

He stayed with me, and I found myself extremely edgy throughout the visit, although he was politely unobtrusive, indifferently enduring my two noisy daughters and two nights in one of their tiny borrowed beds. He spent one morning shaking his head in dismay over one of the books he found on my shelves (After Poststructuralism: Interdisciplinarity and Literary Theory) and took long walks during which in a day and a half he managed to learn more about my neighborhood than I had in three years.

Introducing Edward Sanders

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