Hospitals chief says beds being blocked
Sunday 5th June 2011, 9:00AM BST.
About one in 20 beds at Shropshire’s two main hospitals are being occupied by patients who do not need to be there, it was claimed today.
Dr Leigh Griffin, managing director of both Shropshire County Primary Care Trust (PCT) and NHS Telford and Wrekin, said the organisations were looking at how to improve the bed-blocking situation at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital and Telford’s Princess Royal.
He said the process could be speeded up by ensuring appropriate care packages are in place for when people are ready to leave hospital.
Dr Griffin said about one in 20 beds in hospital was being occupied by someone who didn’t need to be there.
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My mother in law was recently in the Princess Royal Hospital and received excellent care, on her discharge she had to wait 10 days for social services to get home care in place before the hospital could release her. Is this because of cut backs in home care facilities for the elderly. Surely it costs less to care for people at home than to keep them in hospital, when medical care is no longer required.
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Everyone knows that someone else must do something to stop so-called bed blocking.
The result? Nobody does anything about the problem. Why not have an officer at each hospital who ensures suitable arraignments are made? This could be jointly funded.
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My elderly mother recently spent 3 weeks at the RSH most of this time was spent waiting to be transferred to a ‘step-down’ bed at a nursing home, this never materialised, instead after 3 weeks she has been sent to an old people’s home (at her own expense) while we try and arrange some care at home for her. This therefore blocked a bed unnecessarily, but the fault lay with the hospital not my mother or our instance that she stay in hospital, on the contrary we wanted her out into a nursing home for her own good, she was very disorientated and distressed at being in hospital for weeks on end. We firmly believe that their reluctance was due to the fact that this would have been a hospital funded bed and they didn’t want to pay for it. But it would surely have been a much better use of resources than blocking a bed for 3 weeks? We, her family, feel she is now worse off than before she went in and we will be making complaints about the lack of information and general disregard for honest communications
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