Fair Deal scheme abused: Change rules to end bed blocks

Even by the sometimes incomprehensible standards of the HSE it seems amazing that an expert group considering delayed discharges for older people from hospitals — “bed blocking” in the vernacular — could not suggest how the issue might be resolved because the HSE data was so very poor it could not be used to design a solution.

Left in the dark by HSE record keeping, the group used a Dutch metric and found 67,149 delayed discharges last year, almost eight times the number recorded by the HSE — 8,817.