EXCLUSIVE: One pensioner told by the NHS that her home in Milton Keynes was unsafe because of steep staircase discharged herself to a budget hotel – where she’s been for five weeks
Bed blocking is up 70% in five years according to a damning report on the impact for elderly people stuck in hospitals.
New analysis by Age UK shows 57% of people who could be discharged on a typical day were stuck in hospital in 2025/26. One in seven people in hospitals were fit to be discharged and one exasperated pensioner told the Mirror how she had to discharge herself to a budget hotel.
Last month, 14,000 people each day were stuck in hospital in England – mainly because they cannot get social care to be safely discharged somewhere else. This was up 12% since June 2024 when it was 12,000 and is up 70% since 2021.
The charity also collated heartbreaking accounts from elderly people who lost their health and independence as their home care visits were cancelled because they were stuck in hospital.
The report lays bare some of the consequences of the social care crisis as new Prime Minister Burnham enters Downing Street this week promising to at last tackle the crisis.
Caroline Abrahams, Charity Director at Age UK, said hospital delayed discharges are a “crisis hiding in plain sight”. She said: “Our report shows how terrible the impact on older people is when they are medically fit for discharge, but the arrangements cannot be put in place quickly enough or at all to allow this to happen. They are the victims in these situations.”
‘They said I couldn’t go home.. I’ve been in a hotel for 5 weeks’
Retired IT consultant Caroline Brown has been living in a budget hotel for five months since discharging herself from hospital. The 70-year-old broke both her ankles after tripping on an uneven pavement and ended spending five and a half weeks in hospital.
Caroline, from Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, said: “I needed surgery and of course I expected to be [in hospital] while I recovered. But I know for a fact that I didn’t need to be in hospital for that final week. I was medically ready to leave, but there was nowhere for me to go.
“After I finally left hospital, I still couldn’t go home because I live in an old Victorian house and couldn’t manage the stairs. The options I was given just didn’t seem realistic.
“I could either pay thousands of pounds for a care home. I’d get no help with this cost because I’ve been careful enough to save some money over my lifetime, or I could be taken home by ambulance, carried upstairs to my bed and just left there, even though I couldn’t get back downstairs again.
“In the end I decided to check myself into a budget hotel because it was the only place I could recover safely and keep some independence, and it was significantly cheaper than a care home.”
Five months later and Caroline is still recovering at the hotel but hopes to eventually move back home. She has no social care support in place.
She added: “You imagine that when you’re discharged from hospital you’ll get to go home and you’ll get a bit of support, but for me it didn’t mean going home at all. It meant trying to find somewhere I could actually live while I carried on recovering.”
The report also included the following accounts from patients and their carers:
- “When I was ready for discharge, there was no doctor available in the whole hospital to sign off and prescribe medication to go home with, this meant an extra night in hospital, not just for me but also six other patients on the ward.”
- “She was delayed for a few days in hospital because they couldn’t set up home care. We had asked to be informed when she was going to be released. That didn’t happen. A neighbour, on the way to bed noticed a light on in the house. She and her husband went to investigate. Found her laying on her stone kitchen floor. She died from hyperthermia three days later in hospital. She never regained consciousness.”
- “My father was due to leave hospital and had been allocated a rehabilitation slot nearby. But because he was on dialysis and his stay in hospital had been weeks, his dialysis slot in the community had been given to someone else. So, Dad could not leave hospital as there were no slots locally. We were not informed that he had lost his slot. My father ended up dying a horrible death in hospital with no dignity or compassion for him or his family.”
When data collection on delayed discharge resumed after a pause during the Covid-19 pandemic it showed that in April 2021 an average of 8,000 patients in England were medically fit for discharge each day. Latest data shows that in June some 14,000 patients on average remained in hospital who no longer met the criteria to reside there.
The report estimates that delayed discharges are now costing the NHS £230,000 a month. Across 2025/26, the annual cost was £2.7 billion. At least 6.75 million bed days a year are lost to delayed discharges.
The Mirror has launched the Fair Care for All campaign demanding that the crisis is tackled and social care workers properly valued.
Andy Burnham spoke to voters in Cardiff city centre recently where he said: “If there’s one area I’m going to expend quite a lot of political capital, it’s going to be on social care.”
Ms Abrahams said delayed discharges “do enormous harm to older people and cost the NHS and the taxpayer an absolute fortune”. She added: “Ultimately we need to reform social care so there are more and better services available to reduce the risks of older people needing to go to hospital in the first place, and to give them the support they need to get well again, when a hospital stay is unavoidable and they are well enough to leave.”
What has the government said?
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “It is completely wrong to suggest this government has lost its focus on delayed discharge. Tackling the issue is essential to improving patient care, reducing pressure on NHS staff and freeing up hospital capacity.
“The cost to the NHS of people who are medically fit to leave hospital but cannot be discharged runs into the billions, which is why work to turn this around is already under way. Earlier this month, NHS England published its model discharge pathway, setting out best practice for getting patients home or into the right care setting as quickly and safely as possible.
“There is an urgent need to fix social care, and delayed discharge must be part of any conversation about how we build a care system that meets the needs of patients, families and the public.”
