Using hospital data from the last 11 years, Menec et al. (1999)¹⁰ tracked the number of patients in hospital or admitted to hospital each day to establish the normal range of fluctuations in inpatient census, and to identify high-pressure periods (when beds aren’t available and backups occur).

Since 1988 - before bed closures – these high-pressure periods happened almost every year; they occurred in the winters of 1988, 1989 and 1991 when there were about 700 more beds in the system. The same level of pressure has been seen in the winters that followed, regardless of the number of beds in the hospital system.