Patients stay in hospital up to a year after recovery - record numbers of older people trapped in hospital this winter

• Full hospitals can’t discharge even well patients due to lack of nursing home places and community support – wasting £260 million in NHS cash in the last 12 months

• The record delays come after local authority social care budgets fall by £3.5 billion and 294,000 over 65s lose care support

• More than twice as many waiting on A&E trolleys for 12 hours this Christmas as ward beds occupied

Delayed discharges

• One patient waited a full year after being well enough to leave hospital, while three waited between six and 12 months and a further 22 patients waited between three and six months for discharge, FOI responses reveal.

• NHS Trusts were asked to provide details of the longest continual stretch of days that have been lost to delayed discharge by one patient, and to provide the reason why that delay happened in 2013/14. 57 of the responses can be used.

• Of the patients who waited longer than three months in 2013/14:
6 were delayed by wait for completion of assessment;
4 were delayed by wait for nursing home placement;
4 were delayed by wait for NHS care outside hospital;
4 stayed in hospital at their own or family request;
2 were delayed by wait for a residential home placement;
1 waited five months during a dispute over funding and discharge location.

• Outside the longest waiters, 5 patients faced delays with housing and 2 waiting for a home care package to be arranged.

• The shortest single delay experienced by any trust was almost two weeks – 13 days.

The top ten delays were:

Andy Burnham MP, Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary, said:

“This Christmas there are record numbers of elderly people trapped in hospital who would rather be at home with their families.

"It is a sad reflection on a system that is now creaking at the seams and in danger of being overwhelmed. The root cause of this is the Government’s severe cuts to social care, which has seen 300,000 over 65s lose support in the home.

"I warned the Government that if they allowed social care to collapse it will in the end drag down the NHS. They refused to listen and now must take responsibility for the crisis in older people’s care on this Government’s watch.”