A pensioner told by the NHS that her home in Milton Keynes was unsafe because of a steep staircase discharged herself to a budget hotel, where she has been for five weeks. The case highlights a 70% rise in bed blocking over five years, according to a report by Age UK.
Bed blocking up 70% in five years
New analysis by Age UK shows that 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. Last month, 14,000 people each day were stuck in hospital in England, mainly because they cannot get social care to be safely discharged elsewhere. This was up 12% since June 2024 when it was 12,000, and up 70% since 2021.
Pensioner's experience
Caroline Brown, a 70-year-old retired IT consultant from Milton Keynes, broke both her ankles after tripping on an uneven pavement and spent five and a half weeks in hospital. She 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.”
She added: “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, Caroline is still recovering at the hotel but hopes to eventually move back home. She has no social care support in place. She said: “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.”
Impact on patients and carers
The report also included accounts from patients and their carers. One said: “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.” Another said: “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.” A third said: “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.”
Cost of delayed discharges
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.
Charity and government response
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.” She added that delayed discharges “do enormous harm to older people and cost the NHS and the taxpayer an absolute fortune” and that “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.”
Andy Burnham, the new Prime Minister, said recently: “If there’s one area I’m going to expend quite a lot of political capital, it’s going to be on social care.” 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.”
