Patient who's been blocking a bed for more than three years: Two other patients have spent 600 days on a ward as crisis in Welsh NHS is exposed

A patient in Wales has been waiting three and a half years to be discharged from hospital.

The individual, who has complex health needs, has been occupying a hospital bed for 1,338 days.

Their identity has not been revealed but they are being looked after by Hywel Dda University Health Board, in Milford Haven, South Wales.

A patient in Wales has been waiting three and a half years to be discharged from hospital. Stock image

Two other patients have been occupying hospital beds in Wales for almost 600 days, more than one and a half years.

The cases uncovered by the Welsh Conservatives suggest the social care crisis in Labour-run Wales is even worse than in England.

The longest recorded delay in England is just over two years and that was an exceptional case whereby the patient refused to leave.

Under normal circumstances, patients become stuck in hospital when care cannot be set up for them at home due to a lack of funding from councils.

Waiting times in the Welsh NHS are also significantly worse than in England and some patients travel over the border to be seen more quickly.

The patient who is currently stuck in hospital suffers from a serious mental health condition, has a learning disability and also physical needs.

Conservative Assembly member Darren Millar said the delay was ‘truly scandalous.’

‘No patient should have to wait almost four years to be discharged from hospital.

‘While bed blocking is extremely costly for the NHS in Wales, the real cost is the quality of life of patients for whom it affects.’

Mr Millar was sent details of the cases in a letter from the Welsh cabinet secretary for health, Vaughan Gething.

This states that the unnamed patient is likely to be discharged ‘in about six months.’

It adds: ‘We have recently been advised that using a bespoke commissioning approach, the health board has secured a provider who is able to meet all of the patient’s complex needs, subject to some structural alterations to their premises.’

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Two other patients have been occupying hospital beds in Wales for almost 600 days, more than one and a half years. Stock image

Another patient has been stuck in hospital for 589 days in Abertawe Bro Morgannwg University Health Board, in Swansea.

A third patient has been waiting for 583 days to be discharged at Cardiff and Vale University Health Board, the letter also revealed.

Welsh Conservative shadow health secretary Angela Burns said the figures were ‘shocking and a ‘further indictment of the Welsh Labour Government’s failure to process patients through hospitals and into community care within an acceptable timescale.’

In January the James Paget Hospital near Great Yarmouth in Suffolk took legal action to evict a patient who had been there more than two years.

Adriano Guedes, 63, was paralysed from the waist down had refused to move into a care centre because his family could not live there as well.

He was eventually forced out of the hospital on the 10th of January after managers secured a court order to evict him.

SOURCE: Mail Online, Sophie Borland