A handful of patients have between them spent over 6,000 days in acute hospital beds in Dublin hospitals, even though they no longer need treatment.
If these 13 patients had been discharged to step-down beds or suitable nursing homes, their beds could have been used to treat hundreds of other patients on waiting-lists and eased overcrowding in accident and emergency departments.
Figures obtained by The Irish Times indicate three patients at Dublin's St Vincent's Hospital are waiting since early 2003 for discharge. They are past their acute phase of treatment but have nowhere to go. A further six patients at St James's Hospital are each waiting a year to be discharged to a suitable facility.
One person at the Mater hospital has spent 450 days waiting. A patient at Beaumont Hospital is 365 days waiting for appropriate accommodation. Another patient at Tallaght Hospital has been waiting 390 days and a patient at Blanchardstown hospital has been suitable for discharge for 300 days. At Galway's University hospital another patient has been fit for discharge for 120 days.
Such patients are sometimes referred to as "bed-blockers". The Health Service Executive takes issue with this term describing them as "medically discharged patients awaiting alternative care placement". While Minister for Health Mary Harney promised to reduce the number of these patients, yesterday's figures indicate there are still large numbers of them in several hospitals.
In the Mater 73 patients are blocking beds, in Beaumont 79, in Blanchardstown 26, Tallaght 39, St Vincent's 95, St James's 112, University College Hospital Galway 6, Portiuncula Hospital Ballinasloe 8, and Cork University Hospital 13.
The Health Service Executive said it had just signed contracts with nursing homes to provide 500 intermediate care beds to which some of these patients will be discharged. Meanwhile, the Irish Medical Times reported yesterday that a young patient in a chronic vegetative state who could have been discharged to a step-down facility had spent almost 1,000 days or almost three years in an acute hospital, the Mercy University Hospital in Cork, up to the time of her death.
A study earlier this year found if 486 bed days hadn't been used by "overstaying patients" over a three-month period at Blanchardstown hospital it would have allowed treatment of 54 per cent more patients.