It appears that our A&E depts are under pressure. That is normal at this time of year and has to be expected. No organisation puts in place capacity to manage every possible spike as it would be very expensive.
However, things are different these days. I believe that a large number of patients are being held in hospital unnecessarily because social services are not available to move them on. Again this is not unusual but the scale of this bed blocking is getting larger and almost certainly as a direct policy of reducing funding for local authorities.
Our county council has had unprecedented cuts from central government. This means their is less money to provide social care which means people are held in hospital.
I don’t think that cutting local authority funding any further makes sense both practically and financially.
I hope the government rethinks its funding policy.
