NHS Lanarkshire spent nearly £15m keeping patients in hospital last year – the third highest expenditure of its kind in Scotland.
The alarming figures were published by ISD Scotland and reveal 63,921 lost bed days in 2018 at an estimated cost of £234 a day.
That works out to a total of £14,957,514 million.
Now one MSP has said that the statistics show a “crisis in social care”
Labour’s Monica Lennon said: “NHS Lanarkshire is spending millions to keep people in hospital when they don’t need to be there. That’s down to the crisis in social care, which will only be made worse by £230m worth of cuts to local government in the SNP-Green budget.”
However, Linda Fabiani MSP for East Kilbride allayed fears, saying that the health board is to receive an extra £43.7m as part of this year’s Scottish government budget.
The SNP representative said the government are “protecting and investing in public services” and added that NHS Lanarkshire had seen a decrease of over 11 per cent in number of delayed discharge bed days, with a drop of 2217 between the same period in 2017 and 2018.
That was a reduction from 19,856 to 17,639.
Ms Lennon added: “Scottish Labour would ensure social care gets the staff and funding it needs and in government we would introduce a National Care Workers Guarantee with a commitment to secure hours, a living wage and reimbursement for travel and training time.
“We are serious about protecting our NHS and delivering the real change that our communities need.”
Val de Souza, chief officer of the South Lanarkshire Health and Social Care Partnership said that an “improving position” had been seen in relation to delayed discharges.
She added: “There has been a reduction of almost 20 per cent in bed days caused by delayed discharge for the first six months of
this year compared to the same period in the previous year.
“This is despite increasing A&E attendances and emergency admissions – both of which are up by almost three per cent in the same time period.
“This improvement is the result of a good deal of hard work, not least by our hard-working staff, and the introduction of a range of measures which continue to support more people being able to be cared for in the community without the need for hospital admission, as well as supporting earlier discharge.”
Ms de Souza said that the care partnership was also embarking on an “£18m redesign and modernisation programme” relating to care homes.
NHS Lanarkshire was below NHS Lothian, which spent £30,656,574 on delayed discharge and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde which recorded a figure of £14,983,956.
The total for Scotland in 2018 was a staggering £120,475,134.
