The BBC has spoken to a 96 year-old woman who was kept in hospital for nine months as there was no care support available.
According to www.bbc.co.uk/news:
“It’s just this awful feeling of being imprisoned,” said 96-year-old Lily, who was stuck in hospital for nearly a year while waiting for care support to become available.
She is just one of thousands of people in the UK who have been stuck in hospitals or at home due to long waits for care assessments.
Lily was delayed in being discharged despite her being “medically fit”, and because her council had difficulty finding carers to support her at home.
The BBC has found 23% of councils in the UK who provided data had average delays of over a month for care assessments, with some people waiting years for care.
The Local Government Association (LGA) said the figures showed a “chronically underfunded system and the pressures councils continue to face”.
The UK government said waiting lists were down but there was “more to do”.
With no family, Lily has lived on her own in the Vale of Glamorgan for decades.
She was admitted to hospital in February 2022 for an infection and expected to be back home within weeks.
But her stay at Barry Hospital stretched to 15 months. She was fit to leave for 11 of those, but had to wait for carers to become available.
“I’ve just been in bed constantly apart from being hoisted sometimes into a chair – I haven’t had my feet on the ground at all,” she said.
“I used to say ‘when can I go home?’ and the social worker would say ‘we’re very short of staff at the moment’.”
She said her council only found carers for her after she threatened to discharge herself from hospital – but said she doesn’t blame staff.
BBC Wales Investigates and the BBC’s shared data unit asked all 203 local authorities in the UK about their average wait for an initial care assessment in the year 2022 to 2023.
Of the 78 who responded 40% had an average wait of at least three weeks, but five had examples of people waiting more than three years.
At least 1,399 people died while waiting for their local authority to arrange a package of care in 2022/23.
