NHS leaders have said that around 10,000 hospital beds are currently occupied by senior citizens who are ready to go home but cannot be discharged. This is due to a lack of available care workers to look after them at home.
Regular Richie Allen Show listeners will note that I interviewed nurses and care workers in recent months, who predicted this exact scenario. According to The Telegraph:
Senior figures said hospitals were “grinding to a halt” because of a growing crisis in social care, which has left “staggering” numbers of frail and vulnerable people stuck on wards for weeks on end.
Experts said shortages of care home staff – with an estimated loss of around 70,000 such workers in six months – had left hospitals overcrowded, even before winter starts and amid fears the growth of the omicron variant could make things worse.
Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, said: “From our conversations with NHS trust leaders we think around 1 in 10 beds are now occupied by people who are medically fit to be discharged; that’s around 10,000 beds.”
Mr Hopson said: “Many of the risks that are most visible are at the front door of the hospital; the ambulance handover delays, the long trolley waits in accident and emergency departments.
“But this is very significantly driven by delays discharging patients from hospitals, and we really need to see radical action here. Hospitals need as much help as possible to tackle this in order to avoid them grinding to a halt.”
Hopson went on to say that while introducing compulsory jabs for care workers may be a significant factor in exacerbating the crisis, the majority of workers leaving the sector were doing so to take up better paid jobs.
The bed crisis will get worse day by day. Ministers will blame the allegedly more transmissible omicron variant, but also the unvaccinated for allowing it to spread. This is nonsense but it is inevitable. The calls to mandate the jabs for everyone will grow louder.
