Bed blocking costs Scottish NHS over £100m a year

Bed blocking by patients who are ready to be discharged cost the Scottish NHS more than £100 million over the past year despite the Scottish National Party’s (SNP) promise to abolish the scourge, according to new figures.

Official figures published by Labour in a new analysis showed that 511,972 bed days were lost to ‘delayed discharge’ in Scotland’s hospitals in the last year alone.

With NHS Scotland estimating that it costs £214 daily to keep a patient in hospital who can actually be admitted, the analysis calculated that the burden for the past year cost the health service £110 million.

The most common cause of patients being delayed discharge is there being a lack of care in the community for elderly patients, meaning they have to continue using a hospital bed that could be given to someone else.

Labour blamed the cost on the SNP’s decision to cut local authority budgets by £1.5 billion since 2011.

Revealing Labour’s research, Colin Smyth, the party’s social care spokesman, said: “The SNP promised to abolish delayed discharge; instead it has cost our health service more than £100 million in the past year.

“The system is unsustainable. The SNP government cannot continue to slash the budgets of local services that people rely on and not expect it to have a knock on effect to our health service.”

Shona Robison, the Health Minister, said the number of bed days lost to delays had fallen by eight per cent between August 2016 and 2017.

She said: “No one should wait longer than absolutely necessary to leave hospital and that’s why we have legislated to integrate health and social care to ensure services are planned and commissioned in a joined up way from a single budget.

“This year, almost half a billion pounds of additional investment will go into social care and integration while the health revenue budget will increase by almost £2 billion by 2021.”