Comment: Bed blocking needs a solution

Dec 17 2007 Liverpool Daily Post

NOBODY likes spending time in hospital. So it must be unimaginably awful to have to stay in hospital when doctors and nurses believe you are well enough to go home.

Yet that is the position that hundreds of people a year across Merseyside and Cheshire find themselves in, victims of a system failure the doctors call “a delayed discharge”, but which is commonly referred to as “bed blocking”.

It is a problem the Government vowed to tackle when it topped the news agenda some four years ago.

Their solution was one we have come to expect from a Labour government: Find someone to fine, and hit them in the pocket.

In the case of bed blocking, it was local councils who took the financial hit, fined for every night a person remained in hospital just because the right “care package” wasn’t ready for the patient to be looked after at home.

It’s a wonderful theory, based on the assumption that something could be done to solve the bed blocking problems, but would only be done if there was a financial incentive to deal with it.

Sadly, at the end of 2007, this appears not to be the case.

Bed blocking cases are still emerging, and the increasingly frequently too. As the Daily Post reports today, one person at Aintree spent nearly FIVE months in a hospital bed when they should have been treated at home.

It’s a situation which the Government simply must address.

On what grounds can it really take five months to put the appropRiate care in place for someone?

And, while that case is one of the more extreme examples, there are many more who spend a month or two longer than need be in hospital.

As Peter Kilfoyle MP points out, it shouldn’t be about who foots the bill, but about doing what is best for the individual.

And that, as yet, is something this Government has yet to get to grips with.