Myth of spare capacity in private health care sector straining to help the NHS – Keep Our NHS Public: The total number of NHS hospital beds in England has more than halved over the past 30 years, from around 299,000 in 1987/88 to 141,000 in 2019/20.However, the private sector remains much smaller with 8,900 beds, and relies almost entirely on senior doctors who already work for the NHS.