Researchers found older people are waiting on average three days longer in hospital for a residential home position than when the Coalition government took office.
Experts said this meant the NHS hospitals were funding a substantially higher proportion of social care costs because of “needless” waiting by patients.
Health officials are currently grappling with accident and emergency wards that are full to bursting, with part of the problem attributed to delays in discharging patients from hospitals.
According to new figures published on Tuesday by Age UK, it costs the health service at least £1750 a week to maintain one bed compared to almost £530 weekly charge for care homeroom.
The charity said patients now wait an average of 30.3 days before finding a place in a residential care home, a rise of three days per patient since 2010.
Since the Coalition was formed, they said the number of days lost to “delayed discharge” was more than one million and an estimated to the NHS of up to £260m.
Charity officials said that a third of the “days lost” due to delayed discharge are linked to patients waiting for social care.
“Waiting in hospital needlessly not only wastes NHS resources but it can also undermine an older person’s recovery and be profoundly upsetting for them and their families as a result,” said Michelle Mitchell, the Age UK charity director general.
“We are very worried that the growing crisis in social care is having a significant impact on the length of time that older people are having to stay in hospital waiting for social care support to be put in place.”
Over the past two years many local authorities, which provide social care, have been “struggling” to balance their books because of funding cuts, she added.
Many authorities have since raised their eligibility criteria so that older people have to be more frail and disabled to qualify for help.
Cllr Zoe Patrick, chairman of the Local Government Association’s (LGA) Community Wellbeing Board, said: “Sadly this research highlights the very real crisis we are facing in providing even the most basic care to the most vulnerable members of society.
“The current system promotes an inefficient use of taxpayers’ money but more worryingly it also reduces the quality of care people receive.
“Radical reform of the way adult social care is paid for and delivered in future [is needed] or things will get much worse.”
The Department of Health (DoH) yesterday announced that health and social care would be “fully joined up” by 2018
A DoH spokesman said that at present “inadequate co-ordination” between hospital and social care staff leads to some older patients facing “long waits” before being discharged.
He said other elderly people are discharged from hospital to homes which are not adapted to their needs, which leads to them deteriorating or falling and ending up back in A&E.
Source: telegraph.co.uk
