The CQC has released their state of health and adult social care in England report. It makes for sober reading. 

There is a significant problem with discharging people from hospital with only 4 in every 10 patients being discharged when they are ready to leave hospital. In the first instance, this has a huge impact on people who are held in hospital longer than they ned to be and not able to go into their home setting which is by far the best environment for their recovery. The impact on local authorities and health organisations are the cost incurred from these excess bed nights which across the country easily becomes millions of pounds. 

These are some of the headlines from the report: 

• Our health and care system is in gridlock. People in need of urgent care are at increased risk of harm due to long delays in ambulance response times, waiting in ambulances outside hospitals and long waiting times for triage in emergency departments.
• Large numbers of people are stuck in hospital longer than they need to be, due to a lack of available social care.
• People’s inability to access primary care services is exacerbating the high pressure on urgent and emergency care services.
• Staff shortages and struggles to recruit and retain staff are widespread throughout health and care.
• Public satisfaction with NHS health care and with social care has plummeted in 2021/22.
• In our (CQC) survey of people aged 65 and over who had recently used health or social care services, more than a third (37%) who said they were on a health waiting list did not feel well supported. Two in 5 (41%) said their ability to carry out day-to-day activities had got worse while they were waiting.
• There is variation across the country in waiting times for elective care and cancer treatment. People living in the worst performing areas were more than twice as likely to wait more than 18 weeks for treatment as people in the best performing areas.
• In our Community mental health survey 2021, 41% of all respondents reported feeling they had ‘definitely’ seen NHS mental health services often enough for their needs in the last 12 months. This was the lowest score across the period from 2014 to 2021.
• Around half a million people may be waiting either for an adult social care assessment, for care or a direct payment to begin, or for a review of their care. In the first 3 months of 2022, 2.2 million hours of homecare could not be delivered because of insufficient workforce capacity, leading to unmet and under-met needs.