The BGS welcomes the report published today by our friends at Age UK, which shines a spotlight on delayed discharges from hospital. Older people who need to be admitted to hospital generally want to return home as soon as they are able, but unfortunately this is often not the reality. Every day, 13,000 people who are medically well enough to leave hospital cannot be discharged because of hospital processes or a lack of rehabilitation or social care in the community. This is not simply an inconvenience for older people. The longer an older person spends in hospital, the greater the risk of deconditioning and delirium. This then leads to greater care needs on discharge that could have been avoided by a timely discharge.
Discharge delays also have a knock-on effect across the hospital system. If people cannot leave hospital, there is a shortage of available beds and new patients cannot be admitted. This contributes to long waits in emergency departments and the need to provide care in corridors and other inappropriate non-clinical spaces. Older people are most likely to face long delays, with 30% of those attending emergency departments aged 90 and over waiting for 12 hours or more. More than 15,000 people are estimated to have died in 2025 as a result of long waits, a shocking figure for excess deaths which could have been avoided with timely care.
Delayed discharges are estimated to have cost the NHS £2.66 billion in 2025/26. This is a system issue and must be addressed at a system level. Measures to address it include strengthening community services so that older people can be cared for nearer home and do not need to be admitted to hospital in the first place, identifying and treating older people with frailty at the front door of hospitals and enabling them to return home the same day if possible, and reducing the many delays in hospital for tests, medication and other processes that lead to long stays. It also means improving rehabilitation in the community and social care support to ensure that those who do need to be admitted to hospital can be discharged as soon as it is medically appropriate.
We are grateful to Age UK for highlighting this issue and its impact on patients, healthcare professionals and the wider system. We wholeheartedly support their calls on the Government to address delayed discharge. We know that if services work for older people, they will work for the whole health service and we hope that the new Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Health and Social Care will prioritise this problem in the coming weeks.
BGS President Professor Jugdeep Dhesi said:
The figures highlighted in this new report from Age UK are shocking and the fact that they have increased so much over the past few years is even more shocking. Our members tell us about the impact of delayed discharges on older people and the wider healthcare system every day. In addition to the negative effects on older people and their families, issues like this have a profound impact on clinicians who may experience moral injury as a result of not being able to provide the high-quality care that they would like to deliver. Delayed discharges are not inevitable, and we know how to avoid them – services across the country have implemented processes that minimise delays, ensuring that people can return to their homes as quickly as possible. We must learn from those services to ensure that no one faces unnecessary delays.
