PATIENTS from outside Swindon and Wiltshire are increasingly to blame for a hospital bed block crisis, hospital chiefs have heard.

The hospital lost more than 750 bed days to bed block delays in February. Managers also said patients choosing to stay at Great Western Hospital were contributing to to problem.

It emerged that GWH managers have even considered taking legal measures to one woman who had spent more than 100 days on wards despite being fit enough to go home.

Hospitals across the country face rising numbers of so called delayed transfers of care – where patients otherwise fit enough to be discharged from hospital are left waiting on wards because of lack of care home beds, carers or delays in getting them other NHS help.

In Swindon, council health chiefs and NHS managers meet three times a week in a bid to speed patients out of hospital. The meetings have been praised for helping to reduce bed block delays in the town this winter. 

However, GWH executives have heard this week that delays in transferring patients who live in Wiltshire and other areas are increasingly to blame for bed blocking problems in the hospital.

Out of area patients were responsible for 240 lost bed days in February – an 88 per cent jump on the same month last year. 

Jim O’Connell, GWH’s chief operating officer, said that the Swindon hospital was largely hostage to pressures elsewhere in the NHS – saying they were reliant on Clinical Commissioning Groups to repatriate patients stuck at GWH. 

The broker process “in a way isn’t our problem”, he said, adding: “But it becomes our problem when we see it as an out of area that is occupying our hospital.” 

Additionally, patient choice is a growing challenge with patients and their relatives preferring a hospital bed to being moved home or to a care home. 

Kevin McNamara, strategy director, told hospital executives on Thursday that one in four bed block delays at rehabilitation unit the Swindon Intermediate Care Centre could be blamed on patient choice. 

Hospital managers even looked at legal avenues to evict one female patient who spent over 100 days on the wards out of choice. Mr O’Connell said: “It eventually got us to the place where we were legally trying to move this patient on, which was a very uncomfortable position for everybody. But, at the same time, that patient did not qualify to be in an acute hospital.”

However, chief nurse Hilary Walker said that the hospital could do more to support families asked to help move patients out of hospital beds and back home. She told fellow executives that it was not easy to view care homes and come to terms with their family member’s condition in a relatively short space of time.

“I’m not sure there’s enough support there for families who are going through that experience,” she said. 

Executives at GWH are working on a “choice policy” in an effort to tackle the problem. Non-executive director Jemima Milton said the policy - aimed at the hospital’s NHS and council partners - would make it “very clear at what point we will be looking at moving people on”.