More than 14,000 NHS hospital beds are being occupied every day by patients who are well enough to be discharged, figures show, as experts urged ministers tackle the crisis.
The data emerged as a damning report revealed that almost a fifth of care providers were waiting weeks for people to be transferred into their care.
A survey of 568 care homes and homecare providers across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland found huge regional variations, with a lack of agreement on how a person’s social care would be paid for the most common reason cited for delayed admission to a care provider.
Others said wrong or insufficient information provided by NHS hospital staff, a lack of communication, waits for patients to have care assessments or a lack of transport also contributed to delays in patients being able to leave hospital.
Seventeen per cent of respondents said the average length of time for a person to be discharged into their care from hospital was one to two weeks, while 7% said it was three or more weeks.
The East of England performed best when it came to people being discharged, with 96% of patients admitted to a care provider within a week.
Half of providers surveyed in Scotland said discharges took more than a week; 15% in the West Midlands and 10% of those in Yorkshire and the Humber said it took more than three weeks to get a patient admitted into their care.
Autumna, a care directory service, which carried out the survey, said samples from Wales and Northern Ireland were too small to provide reliable regional findings.
The latest NHS figures for England show an average of 12,326 hospital patients a day were medically fit and ready to be discharged to a variety of settings in July, but were not.
The latest NHS figures for Scotland showed the average number of beds occupied per day by those who should have left hospital was 1,983 in June, a rise on 1,942 in May and the highest figure ever recorded.
Prof Martin Green, the chief executive of Care England, said the report outlined a system that was “failing” and would “only get worse unless remedial action is taken”.
He added: “Care providers are frustrated and angry by the lack of a clear and strategic approach to discharge, and the fact that nobody is delivering a national perspective.
“We are constantly hearing about bottlenecks within hospitals, the root cause of which is often a lack of a clear and strategic approach to appropriately discharge patients.”
The pressure on the NHS was often self-made, he added, and was a symptom of a system “obsessed” with process that had “forgotten” patients should be the priority.
Mike Padgham, the chair of the Independent Care Group, which represents social care providers in Yorkshire, said the report was the latest in a long line to paint a “bleak and unacceptable” picture.
“Enough is enough,” he said. “The system is in need of reform so that people can get the care they need, when and where they need it.”
Debbie Harris, the founder of Autumna, said the findings were a “wake-up call” to Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting that the system was broken and urgently required reform.
“The pressures are only going to get worse as our population gets older, so we need to fix the system now, before it completely breaks down,” she said.
The NHS said it recognised that the number of delayed discharges was “unacceptable” and was working to improve the system.
The government said it was committed to reforming the social care sector and building a National Care Service but did not specify when this would happen.
