More patients awaiting hospital discharge since £750m boost

MORE patients are stuck in London hospitals waiting to be discharged than when the Government announced a £750 million package of funding in the winter to speed up discharges six months ago, it can be revealed today.

A total of 1,551 patients were waiting to be discharged on April 30 — a rise of 15 per cent on the figure of 1,338 reported on November 17 last year, when details of how the fund would be spent were made public.

Nationally, one in seven NHS beds are still taken up by people waiting to be discharged. Ministers had pledged to spend £500 million to buy social care beds amid the worst-ever winter crisis, with record wait times for treatment in A&E and for ambulances. This was supplemented by a further £250 million in January with the stated aim of speeding up hospital discharges.

Delayed discharges can lead to gridlock in A&E as sick patients cannot be allocated a bed, which contributes to delays for ambulances attempting to hand over patients.

Many beds in hospital are taken up by elderly, vulnerable patients with no social care package to be discharged into. An average of nine in 10 (92.3 per cent) London hospital beds were occupied in April, according to the latest NHS figures. In one London NHS trust, the occupancy rate was as high as 98.2 per cent.

However, waiting times in A&E have dropped since winter amid falling cases of flu, Strep A and a decrease in demand. More than 5,300 people in London waited over 12 hours for treatment in A&E last month — a drop of more than 3,200 on the figure reported in January.

Liz Kendall MP, Labour’s shadow minister for social care, said: “Too many people are stuck in hospital and unable to go home because of the Government’s failure to prevent them being there in the first place. A decade of broken Tory promises has left our social care system on its knees.”

The Department of Health said: “We are fully committed to speeding up the safe discharge of patients in London who no longer need to be in hospital and expect the vast majority of people to be discharged to their home or normal place of residence.

“Over the next two years we are making a record investment of £1.6 billion to support discharge form hospital into the community. This is on top of the £500 million invested over the winter.”