Bed-blocking costs the NHS £142m a year
SNP urged to fix ‘avoidable problem’
BED-blocking is costing the NHS in Scotland £142million a year.
Critics branded the costs ‘eye-watering’ and called for improvements in social care.
An annual report has revealed 358,426 days were spent in hospital by people whose discharge was delayed in the year to March 2021, with two-thirds due to patients awaiting care services or assessments.
The average daily number of beds occupied by bed-blocking was 982 last year, compared with 1,481 in 2019-20 – a 34 per cent decrease, largely because wards were emptied when the pandemic hit.
Although bed-blocking costs are not yet available for the year to March 2021, costs for the previous year have been calculated at £142million, the Public Health Scotland report states.
The SNP vowed to eradicate bed-blocking by the end of 2015 but has failed to do so.
Delayed hospital discharge can cause problems such as putting patients at risk of hospital infections and increasing their frailty through reduced mobility.
Delays are caused by hold-ups in the organising of care assessments, care at home packages or care home places.
Scottish Lib Dem leader Alex Cole-Hamilton said: ‘Keeping people in hospital unnecessarily causes disruption, distress and the deterioration of conditions.
‘Delayed discharges involve eye-watering sums of money for the NHS and in the majority of cases it is an entirely avoidable problem. Most people are waiting on a care home place, social care support to enable them to live in their own home or for an assessment to be conducted.
‘It has been a full five years since the SNP’s target to end delayed discharges was missed. Despite plan after plan, minis ters haven’t managed to make a dent in the problem.
‘It is time they delivered a step change in social care pay and conditions to open up the options for moving people out of hospital and into more suitable care as soon as they are ready.’
Scottish Conservative health spokesman Dr Sandesh Gulhane said: ‘The costs to our health service of delayed discharge are threatening to spiral out of control, due to patients staying in hospital for longer than necessary.
‘Successive SNP health secretaries have failed miserably to solve this perennial issue that continues to put a strain on our hospitals. The SNP’s current plans are simply not going to solve this crisis.’
Scottish Labour health spokesman Jackie Baillie said: ‘Every year absurd amounts of money and NHS resources are frittered away as a result of the SNP’s failure to tackle delayed discharge.
‘Social care in Scotland is on its knees and this is piling pressure on our already stretched NHS. The SNP need to finally act to fix the staffing crisis that they created and deal with the growing problems across health and social care before winter really bites.’
A Government spokesman said ‘significant additional funding’ had been allocated to address the bed-blocking problem, ‘including £62million to enhance care at home, £48million to increase the hourly rate of [staff] pay, £40million to support interim care arrangements and £20million to enhance multi-disciplinary teams’.
He added: ‘We have also recently launched our “discharge without delay” programme, backed by £5million, to help local health and social care partnerships improve discharge planning arrangements.’
‘Eye-watering sums of money’