More than 120 healthy patients stuck in Yorkshire hospitals

The NHS trust runs Pinderfields Hospital in Wakefield

More than 120 patients are awaiting discharge from three hospitals due to a lack of care home places, an NHS trust has said.

The Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust said the number was equivalent to five full hospital wards.

The trust, which runs Pinderfields, Pontefract and Dewsbury hospitals, said the issue was affecting "flow" within its emergency care departments.

The number of discharged patients has only dropped by two in the last month.

Speaking at a trust board meeting on Thursday, chief operating officer Trudie Davies said 125 people were awaiting discharge.

"The key reason for people staying in hospital, which has received some national attention, is the crisis in the care home sector," she said.

"Care homes are increasingly unable to support with living arrangements. It's typical of the national picture at the moment."

This week, the annual Skills for Care workforce report found that 8.2% of care sector jobs, more than 100,000 posts, remained unfilled.

Increasingly, care companies are forced to turn down work supporting patients as they move from hospital back to their own homes or care homes, the report said.

Dan Ryan from care home charity MHA said the situation was "incredibly serious" due to a staffing crisis "which has not really been seen in living memory".

Mr Ryan said three of its Yorkshire homes had put a cap on new admissions which would cause a "log jam" on hospital discharges.

"So although we may have beds available we may not have sufficient staff available to accept people into some of our homes," he said.

"What we can't do is continue to admit people and keep that quality of care and safety up."

According to the Local Democracy Reporting Service, Ms Davies told the meeting: "If we didn't have this issue, we'd free up more capacity for the emergency department and it would free up ambulances and we'd have a system which would work fairly well.

"But the reality is when you have five wards of patients who don't need to be in hospital, we're going to be tinkering round the edges, rather solving the root cause of the problem."