Roughly 600 hospital beds in Northern Ireland are being taken up by patients who should have gone home says Department of Health

According to the Department of Health in 2021/22 there were just over 5,800 beds in total across Northern Ireland.

Assuming that total is still about right, it means that roughly one-tenth of all hospital beds at any given time are taken up by people who should have gone home.

The figure came to light thanks to a question to the UUP health minister Robin Swann from Diane Dodds, DUP MLA for Upper Bann.

In his response to her, Mr Swann gave a snapshot of the number of patients in each trust who were still in a bed despite being “deemed fit for discharge” on March 15th this year.

They are as follows:

Belfast health trust: 150

South Eastern: 67

Southern: 149

Western: 148 (this only covers patients at “acute” sites, so the true number is likely higher)

Northern: 114 (this too refers to “acute” sites only)

That all adds up to a total of 628... but given the caveats above it is hard to know what the exact figure is.

Mrs Dodds acknowledged that this is probably an underestimate of the true number, and said: “This is now well into spring, when the annual surge of winter respiratory cases will have subsided.

“More than 600 hospital beds being unavailable is the equivalent of keeping the doors locked to one of our large acute hospitals. It is an absolute travesty.

"It must be enormously frustrating for anyone awaiting admission to hospital for treatment to know there ought to be several hundred more beds available every day.

“There are problems in our public services that are incredibly tricky and require a high level of complexity to try to fix, but this ought not to be one of them.

"Someone needs to be put in charge of resolving this immediately, much like Patricia Donnelly oversaw the Covid vaccination roll-out. This ought to be an utmost priority for the Department of Health.

“Our hospital staff are being forced to go in to work each morning with one arm tied behind their back, or like a football team that is always a couple of goals down before the game starts.

"I struggle to understand, when the impact is so significant, why this hasn’t been prioritised more.

“If you pause to think what could be achieved over the course of a year with that number of beds, it is out of the question for this to be allowed to go on any longer”.

As to the question of what is being done to stop bed-blocking, Mr Swann responded to Mrs Dodds that a team has been assembled for that purpose.

“As you will be aware, a number of delayed discharges are due to a shortage of community provision to support the person when they return home,” he said.

He added that he has recently announced a “£70m support package for social care providers and hospices [to] help independent sector organisations deal with rising costs from the start of the new financial year, particularly forthcoming minimum wage increases”.