Doctors pin blame on councils for rise in bed-blocking

Doctors believe that local authority cuts to care services and tightened eligibility criteria are making it more difficult for older patients to leave hospital even though they are fit enough to do so, a poll conducted for The Guardian newspaper has suggested.

Half of the 502 doctors surveyed for the paper by Doctors.net.uk said so-called “bed-blocking” was worse than a year ago. A further 40% suggested the situation had not improved in that time.

Senior doctors told the paper that councils were making it harder for older people to access home help and that budget cuts had seen many authorities redefine eligibility criteria.

Dr Mark Porter, chairman of the British Medical Association's hospital consultants committee, claimed that some patients with pressing medical conditions cannot be admitted immediately because healthy patients are occupying beds.

He told The Guardian: "I would estimate that several thousand such patients are in the NHS at any one time – that's a fairly significant problem. It's very distressing for individual patients, of great concern to the medical profession and an organisational problem for the NHS.

"If you have a core of people who should be moving on but aren't, your capacity to respond to new admissions is diminished and that leads to inefficiency and increased cost. There's definitely a feeling [among doctors] that it's difficult to move patients out of hospital who are medically fit but can't be discharged because there's nowhere else to go where they'll be adequately supported."

Nigel Edwards, acting chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said the issue was something NHS hospitals had been increasingly concerned about.

He added: “There was a big improvement in this four or five years ago. But over the last few years there's been a feeling that in some places the situation has deteriorated again. People [hospital managers] who haven't had this problem before are starting to find quite large numbers of people that they are having trouble discharging because it's hard to arrange to get them back home or into a residential home.".

The Department of Health announced earlier this month that it was making an extra £162m available between now and the start of April to help patients live independently at home.

Health Secretary Andrew Lansley said: "It's really important, particularly at this time of year, that we help people to leave hospital as quickly as they can, when they are ready. The latest figures show that 2,575 beds are unavailable due to delayed transfers of care."