NHS Fife has explained why a patient deemed fit to leave hospital remains there after seven years.
Newly-released figures, revealed by the Scottish Conservatives, show that the patient has been lingering in care for 2,576 days.
Successive SNP health chiefs have had to grapple with worsening delayed discharge statistics, often due to a lack of care home spaces for older patients.
Scottish Tory MSP Sandesh Gullhane took aim at the SNP over the seven-year wait, branding it “scarcely believable”.
And he claims the party led by First Minister John Swinney squandered money on the ill-fated proposals for a National Care Service which could have instead been spent on existing services.
‘Highly complex care’ requirements
But NHS Fife says this particular patient requires “highly complex care in a specialist facility”.
A spokesperson told The Courier: “An interim placement would be inappropriate and unreasonable, and not in the individual’s best interests.”
A Public Health Scotland report from 2023 revealed 58 per cent of delayed discharges across NHS Fife related to social care problems.
The other 42 per cent affected across the health board were unable to leave hospital for “complex reasons”, the highest proportion in Scotland.
Tory MSP Mr Gullhane also criticised the SNP over figures showing the average delayed discharge wait was 854 days, more than two years.
He said: “Patients up and down the country are suffering shocking waits of several years.”
But NHS Fife says the data includes patients who have learning difficulties or severe mental health problems.
Stratheden Hospital, near Cupar, is a psychiatric facility in Fife for those with particularly complex needs.
A spokesperson for the health board said: “Such patients are not ordinarily included within the regularly published statistics on delayed discharges.
“As such, it is inappropriate to compare these with patients in acute and community hospitals awaiting packages of care, whose needs are vastly different.”
Health chiefs say the average wait once these cases are discounted is two weeks.
A Scottish Government spokesperson said: “While we cannot comment on individual patients, there are some highly complex cases – including mental health patients or hospital based complex clinical care patients – where unfortunately it extremely difficult to find an appropriate care package.
“Long-term hospital inpatient cases of this nature remain rare.”
In 2023, we reported that NHS Fife had set a new record for the number of patients being discharged.
The Scottish Government recognises unnecessarily lengthy spells in hospital can be harmful physically and mentally.
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