Care crisis: Woman imprisoned in hospital due to staff shortages

Research uncovered by the BBC found thousands of medically-fit patients have been left in hospital due to carer shortages.

Research, which was announced yesterday, discovered 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.

After reviewing the data, the Local Government Association (LGA) said the figures showed a ‘chronically underfunded system and the pressures councils continue to face.’

From the research, an example of somebody who had been left in a hospital bed rather than provided with a care support, is 96-year-old Lily who said she felt nothing less than ‘imprisoned’.

Lily, who has lived on her own in the Vale of Glamorgan for decades, was admitted to hospital in February 2022 for an infection and expected to be back home within weeks. However, her stay at Barry Hospital stretched to 15 months despite her being ready to be discharged with a carer after 11.

Lily claimed her local authority found carers for her after she threatened to discharge herself from hospital – but said she doesn’t blame staff.

Commenting on the discovering, Martin Jones MBE, CEO Home Instead UK & International: ‘The news that Lily, a 96-year-old woman deemed medically fit to return home, has instead been stuck in hospital for almost a year is both shocking and completely unsurprising. It’s shocking that in Britain in 2023 we are capable of treating people like this. And it’s unsurprising because we’ve been heading in this direction with inevitability for years.

‘Lily has been stranded in hospital simply because there is no one to look after her at home. A chronic lack of community care provision across the UK is directly contributing to the current NHS crisis – and leaving people like Lily in this terrible situation. This is a systemic failure.

‘Successive governments have said they want to address the problem with greater resources and recruitment for the care sector – but then there’s always some more pressing crisis and the care problem just gets shelved again.

‘But enough is enough. The horrifying case of Lily must be a wakeup call. The time to solve the UK’s care crisis is right now. We cannot let this happen any longer.’

Against this backdrop, 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.

Devastatingly, over 1,300 people died while waiting for their local authority to arrange a package of care in 2022/2023.

In a bid to keep more carers within the health and social care sector and to attract more people to the job role, the Welsh government said it was investing £70m this year to improve the pay of carers to £10.90 per hour.

Following this, the department of Health and Social Care said it was providing up to an additional £7.5bn for social care in England over the next two years to increase wages, reduce waiting times and increase workforce capacity. 

Image: SJ Objio