Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the impact that current delays to hospital discharge are having on waiting times for NHS services.
No formal assessment has been made. Guidance on hospital discharge was issued in November 2021 and details of additional measures to reduce the number of people delayed from leaving acute hospitals has been communicated to National Health Service organisations and local authorities. Since March 2020, we established a national discharge taskforce and allocated £3.3 billion available to support safe and timely hospital discharge.