More than 80 patients fit to go home are stuck in hospital this week as the region’s healthcare system struggles under ongoing pressure.
And NHS Dumfries and Galloway chief executive Jeff Ace has admitted that the problem won’t be resolved any time soon because of a shortage of nearly 200 care workers.
Mr Ace said: “This is going to be a continuing battle for us to generate capacity in the community that allows us to discharge everyone home from hospital the minute they’re clinically suitable.”
Delayed discharge is when a patient is medically cleared to go home but cannot leave hospital, often because a social care package is not in place.
Last month, it was revealed that a patient spent more than 600 days in one of the region’s hospitals despite being given the all-clear to go home due to delayed discharge.
Mr Ace gave a performance update at Monday’s health board meeting and gave a stark assessment of the bed blocking crisis.
He said: “With delayed discharges, we do have one of the more significant problems in NHS Scotland.
“Although the December figures are showing a slight drop, January figures again have continued an upward trend – to the extent that we have over 80 delayed discharges in the system at the moment.
“This is a really tough one to crack. There will not be a fast resolution to this. It’s down to that fundamental capacity in the community to provide care packages.
“We’re again working with partners across the health and social care partnership around recruitment, around further job applications, trying to fast-track new capacity into this.
“But we’re well over 100 and close to 200 full-time carers short of the capacity that we would need on an ongoing basis.”
He added: “We are seeing a bit of pressure in the care home estate at the moment as well, with very few available beds.
“That again is pushing back on our ability to discharge quickly.”
While the health board is performing reasonably well in delivering cancer services and “slightly below” targets for treatment time guarantees, Mr Ace also highlighted that non-urgent elective surgeries are having to be cancelled because of a beds shortage.
“It’s something that, when coming out of the pandemic, we’ve got to have a very, very strong plan to recapture and reprioritise that elective work,” he said.
“We’ve got a real mountain to climb in terms of orthopaedics to recapture where we want to be in terms of minimising wait.
“They’re going to be significantly disadvantaged in terms of their mobility and their independence as they wait for these interventions, whether that’s through our musculo-skeletal service or through ultimately to the clinical operation. We should be seeing this now as a significant added health burden for those individuals and for us as a region.”
