Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what estimate his Department has made of the number of medically optimised patients in hospital because they do not have a care package in place by (a) hospital and (b) local authority area.

This data is not available in the format requested.¹ NHS England publishes monthly data on delayed transfers of care. The latest data is for October 2017 and can be accessed via the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/delayed-transfers-of-care/

Note:

¹As of April 2017, data on the number of patients delayed on the last Thursday of the month is no longer being collected. This measure has been replaced in the Delayed Transfers of Care (DTOC) publication files by a similar measure called DTOC Beds. The DTOC Beds figure is calculated by dividing the number of delayed days during the month by the number of calendar days in the month. This provides a similar figure to the patient snapshot, but is more representative of the entire month rather than providing a view on one particular day. The time series for patient snapshot data is available for the period August 2010 to March 2017.