Dr Adrian Boyle, the new president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, told the Daily Mail that NHS hospitals “are like lobster traps… easy to get in but hard to get out”. He warned that the social care crisis meant 13,000 patients were left stranded in hospital despite being well enough to be discharged. Up to a third of hospital beds in parts of England are taken up by patients fit enough to be discharged, it was reported on Sunday night. As a result, the wards are full of elderly patients who have no medical needs but need help with basic needs such as washing and cooking. Hospitals cannot discharge such patients without a care plan, with many shortfalls in staff to carry out such checks. This so-called bed block is fueling a record NHS backlog with more than seven million patients waiting to start treatment. Dr Boyle said things “could easily get worse” with hospitals operating at 94.3 per cent capacity – the highest ever and still weeks before the winter peak of the disease. Safety is at risk when occupancy exceeds 85 percent, according to the British Medical Association. “Hospitals are like lobster traps – easy to get into and hard to get out of,” Dr Boyle told the Mail. “If social care could do its job the way we want it to, these poor people wouldn’t be stuck in hospital. “I have elderly parents and I am desperate to keep them out of hospital. “For someone who is weak, the hospital is often a bad place for them. They hurt them when they are in the hospital.” On Sunday night, the Guardian reported that one in five beds were taken up by a “blockage” in 35 of England’s 121 acute hospitals. This figure rose to almost one in three in two trusts – North Bristol and Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh. Dr Boyle, who works as a consultant in emergency medicine at Addenbrooke’s Hospital Cambridge, said “what people see in the media makes them feel uneasy” about calling 999. He told the Mail: “There is fear of calling an ambulance, there is fear of accessing healthcare, there are long waits and stays in emergency care and the care they receive is delayed and diluted.” Dr Boyle said the Government needed to bring in more social care workers to free up beds. The seven-day rolling average for delayed bed withdrawals peaked at 13,723 in the week to October 11, but had eased slightly to 13,557 by the end of the month. Overall, just 40 per cent of hospital patients were discharged when they were ready in October, according to NHS figures. That was unchanged from September, but down from 41 percent in July and 43 percent in June. There are stark regional differences across the country, with an average of 49 per cent of patients in London being discharged last month when they were ready, compared with 32 per cent in the South West and 31 per cent in the North West. The figure for South East England and North East England and Yorkshire was 41 per cent, with 43 per cent for the East of England and 44 per cent for the Midlands.
