I READ with interest your editorial (LET, July 15) concerning the early deaths of residents of nursing and care homes discharged from hospitals.

While I wholeheartedly share your concern over the facts highlighted, I think the fundamental causes have been missed.

It is my experience that elderly patients are being discharged from hospital not too early, but too late.

Because of the financial constraints placed upon hard-pressed social services departments they are unable to fund sufficient beds in nursing homes for elderly folk who are ready to come out of hospital once their effective treatment is finished. As a result, such people are obliged to remain on the wards receiving care which is inappropriate to their needs.

They are taking up beds which could otherwise be used for those requiring urgent treatment and in a location which is often very inconvenient for their family and friends to reach.

All this is at a cost to the NHS approximately twice that of a bed in a local nursing home.

Weeks may go by before the local authority has found sufficient money to pay for nursing home care for these elderly patients, many of whom may have already begun to deteriorate and become emotionally dispirited by the time they can leave hospital.

How right you are to refer to a 'budget tussle' between the NHS and the social services. Until this ludicrous situation is resolved, our elderly people will continue to be tragically under-served while at the same time the taxpayer is being grossly over-charged.

DAVID LEWIS, Director, Mapleford Nursing Home, Bolton Avenue, Huncoat.

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