From experience a more common reason for bed blocking isn't that people are waiting to go into homes, but that they're waiting to GO home, and their homes for one reason or another aren't deemed suitable. I was in hospital for three months and for last month the other three in a small ward of four were there solely because their homes needed modification before they were allowed home. Had I not desperately wanted to get home they could have kept me there for another eight months.
This was a small hospital where we were sent after major operations in the main hospital, and our bed blocking was stopping others following us (I spent an unnecessary week in the main hospital as someone couldn't leave the other hospital on time) and them in turn being the main cause of ambulances being held up because of lack of beds. I read in the local press of a paramedic spending a whole shift in his ambulance outside the hospital.
From my experience with my dad, the bed blocking is because people are waiting to be moved on to the next stage of medical care - be this going home, going to a temporary assessment care home to decide the next steps, being sent to a rehabilitation hospital because they are too well to be in hospital but not well enough to go home or, simply, because there is no where, of any description, to take them. We've been in one or other of these scenarios at least three times in the past twelve months with dad.
As to paramedics being on their ambulance for the whole shift - in the south west, this has become routine. I've spent much of a paramedics shift sat in the ambulance with my dad, with two paramedics, just waiting. I've even experienced a changeover in shift - the ambulance which took dad to the hospital car park came from a different health care district and had to return there at the end of the shift. The paramedics moved my dad, his possessions and the trolley on which he was lying from one ambulance to another and the whole waiting game began again until a trolley slot became available in A+E. He then had to wait on a trolley for 24 hours (last time). On a previous occasion he had to wait 36 hours!
My dad is still in the hospital, a continuation of the car park wait that I explained above, and on the various visits I have made to see him pass that ambulance car park. Fifteen ambulances waiting one time, seventeen another and twenty three on another occasion.
Even fifteen ambulances, that's thirty paramedic professionals who are taken out of the community and unable to help in field emergencies.
The whole system is a mess and I feel very sorry for the paramedics. So many of them get a hard time when they arrive six, maybe ten hours after a relative initiates a call to 999. It simply isn't their fault. I wont give them a hard time personally because I appreciate the difficulties that they are facing and the fact that they appear to be caught between a rock and a hard place.
My mum died just under three years ago. She fell and had a bleed. My dad sat with her on the floor waiting for an ambulance to arrive. It took six hours. He was pleading with them by the end. They were both 88 at the time. She died three days later in hospital with us by her side. I asked for a formal explanation of why the ambulance took so long. I got a very detailed written explanation. Ambulances and beds were under pressure even then.
Is the situation particular to my dad's local university hospital? I understand not - it became acute in Cornwall first, then Plymouth, then Torbay and now Exeter. Where we used to live in Surrey, although slightly better, it was still pretty dire.
The whole system is broken and needs fixing - and I suspect via the private purse if I am honest.
looking bite. After that it gets confused with flu.
