The social care crisis is killing the NHS

Analysis: With A&E waiting times at the worst levels ever, sorting social care is the key to helping hospitals, writes health correspondent Shaun Lintern

During September there was a daily average of 4,979 beds occupied by patients waiting to leave hospital (Getty)

The latest NHS performance statistics are ghastly – hospitals and, let’s not forget, their staff, are working flat out in the face of rising accident and emergency attendances with record numbers of patients being forced to wait hours to be seen.

But the true horror lies a little deeper in the stats and, while it will attract fewer headlines, the frightening reality is there for all to see: the collapse of social care is dragging down the health service.

A hospital is almost like a living organism in that it has a circulatory system that relies on the ability to move patients from A&E to the wards and operating theatres for treatment, then on to recovery and finally back to either their home or another provider.

But according to the NHS England data, during September 2019, there was a daily average of 4,979 beds occupied by patients who were medically fit and healthy but could not be discharged because of delays in sorting out their social care needs.

The main reason for delays was for patients waiting to have a care package set up in their own home, which accounted for more than one in five of all delays. Almost 50 per cent of these delays were due to social care, 30 per cent were the fault of the NHS alone with 20 per cent blamed on both sectors.

The effect of these patients being stranded in a hospital bed means other patients who need a bed for their operation, or to recover following their emergency in A&E, have to wait. In what has become an everyday occurrence, hospitals are cancelling operations and forcing patients to spend hours on trolleys because they have no spare beds.

So far in the general election campaign both main parties have been falling over themselves to promise the health service billions of pounds of extra investment.

But all the money in the world is of no help if at the end of their treatment patients are being stranded in hospital because of the UK’s starved, neglected, unappreciated social care system.

Labour’s £26bn NHS rescue plan notably left out social care and the Tories have yet to mention it.

Both parties have dodged this bullet for years and that abdication of responsibility is now killing the NHS too; it is leaving nurses and doctors broken at the end of their shifts; it’s leaving vulnerable elderly people at risk and it’s leaving more patients waiting in pain because their operations have been cancelled.

All while the ambulances and patients keep rolling up to the emergency department front door.