Responding to the latest monthly performance statistics from the NHS, Simon Bottery, Director of Policy and External Relations at Independent Age, the older people’s charity, said:
“Of the 154,000 hospital bed days lost due to delayed transfers of care, it is deeply worrying that the lack of a home care package caused 27,500 of these. This problem, which typically affects elderly patients, looks set to soon become the single largest cause of lost bed days.
"Yet we have by no means reached the end of the cuts to social care which have contributed to the rise in elderly people stuck in hospital. Councils are being told they need to make even more efficiencies in social care yet services are in danger of being made ‘efficient’ to the point of collapse.”