Patients with dementia left stranded in hospital beds

DEMENTIA patients are becoming ‘part of the furniture’ in hospitals because they are trapped there for so long, a charity has warned.

Some spend up to a year on wards because it is so hard for families to arrange care for them at home.

The Alzheimer’s Society predicted 1,400 dementia sufferers will be in hospital needlessly over Christmas due to failings in social care.

An analysis by the charity has found patients with dementia spend up to ten times longer in hospital than those without the condition.

Jeremy Hughes, its chief executive, said wards were being ‘turned into waiting rooms’ and full of dementia sufferers ready to go home.

Patients with dementia typically take longer to recover from operations, infections or falls than those without the condition.

Once they are ready to leave hospital, they are often delayed for several days or weeks waiting for social care to be set up at home.

Many develop a second infection as a result of being in hospital and take two or three weeks to recover.

An estimated million British adults have dementia, including Alzheimer’s Disease, and one in three of us will develop it during our lifetimes. The Alzheimer’s Society carried out a detailed audit in six hospital trusts in England and recorded how long dementia patients stayed on wards.

One trust in the South East said patients with dementia spent an average of 68 days before being discharged compared with 6.8 days for those without the condition.

Mr Hughes said: ‘With such scarce social care funding, wards are being turned into waiting rooms and safety is being jeopardised. People

‘Safety is being jeopardised’

with dementia are repeatedly falling victim to a system that cannot meet their needs.’ The charity also surveyed 107 nurses and found that one in ten had looked after dementia patients who had been in hospital for at least a year.

A Department of Health spokesman said: ‘No one should be stuck in hospital when their treatment has finished. That’s why we’ve given an extra £2billion funding for social care over the next three years.’