Rise in discharge delays poses winter overcrowding risk to hospital patients

Hospitals in England face dangerous overcrowding this winter because even more patients than last year are “stranded” in a bed, according to an analysis of NHS figures.

- Denis Campbell Health policy editor

The health service is struggling to cope after the early onset of its usual winter crisis due to a crippling “flu-nami” and the NHS in England is bracing for a five-day strike by resident doctors starting on Wednesday.

Hospitals will have fewer beds available this winter than usual because “delayed discharges” - beds occupied by people who are medically fit to leave but have nowhere to go - have been even worse in the run-up to the cold season than they were last year, research by the Health Foundation has found.

Senior doctors and NHS leaders said the lack of beds identified by the thinktank would make an already “truly shocking” situation this winter harder still for hospitals.

They said it would lead to ambulance queues building up outside A&E departments, patients facing long waits, widespread “corridor care”, an increased spread of the flu virus - and an even greater risk that seriously ill patients would die because of delays in finding them a bed.

The Health Foundation analysed the delayed discharges in hospitals in England from July to September last year and the same period this year. It found: