A report published today also highlighted that the number of bed days occupied by older people who are no longer benefiting from acute care is approximately 2.7 million a year.
The PAC is urging government to adopt measures to prevent discharge delays, which are damaging patient health and compromising the financial sustainability of the health service.
According to the committee, the government has a poor understanding of the scale of the problem, and official data significantly underestimates the range of delays and the number of people affected.
It also criticises a “patchy” discharge record across the country, despite the fact that good practice is well understood. Patients “had a right to expect better,” the MPs said.
Specifically, the committee identified that poor sharing of patient data was an obstacle to improving performance, and pointed out that a fragile adult social care provider market was making the situation more challenging. Moreover, due to the financial pressure on local authorities, the gap between the demand for and availability of adult social care was likely to widen in the coming years, making progress on the issue even harder to attain.
However, the committee rejected the idea that a shortage of money was to blame. It said: “NHS England shows a striking poverty of ambition in believing that holding delays to the current inflated level would be a satisfactory achievement.”
PAC chair Meg Hillier MP quoted studies that indicate older people can lose 5% of muscle strength per day of treatment in a hospital bed. She said this impacted negatively on patient health and hurt the public finances.
She added: “While there have been improvements, the Department of Health and NHS bodies are still failing to properly address the root causes of this problem.”
Blaming local circumstances for poor performance short-changed patients and was an “unacceptable cop-out when the government has clear indicators of what works and the power to drive change,” Hillier said.
Best practice, she advised, could be as simple as planning a patient’s discharge early in their stay, or conducting shared patient assessments between health and social care providers. She urged NHS Improvement to move faster to ensure these practices were adopted on a wider scale.
Responding to the report, Richard Murray, director of policy at the King’s Fund, said: “The growing and unacceptable delays in discharging patients from hospital highlighted in today’s report symbolise the twin crises facing the NHS and social care.
“As well as unnecessarily occupying beds for patients who need them, this is costing the NHS in excess of £800m a year,” he added. “More importantly it imposes a significant human cost on the patients and families affected.”
He highlighted new figures published since the report was finalised, which he said show that the number of patients medically fit for discharge but kept in hospital had reached record levels.
Explaining the rise, he said delays arranging social care for patients who need support when they are discharged were to blame, which was “a direct result of year-on-year cuts in social care funding.
