Labour will use NHS budgets to buy extra care home places in a bid to shift bed-blockers out of hospital, Wes Streeting has revealed.
The shadow health secretary said too many medically fit patients are taking up space on wards that could be occupied by those needing operations.
He told an event at the Royal Society of Medicine that delayed discharges cost the NHS £1.7 billion a year, which could be better spent elsewhere.
The number of patients currently stuck in NHS beds due to a lack of social care provision ‘could fill 26 hospitals’, Mr Streeting added.
An average of 12,360 hospital beds per day were occupied by patients ready to be discharged last month, while waiting lists climbed to 7.57 million in April, according to NHS England.
The bottleneck comes amid a social care crisis, with local authorities short of cash and carers quitting their jobs to take up better paid work in supermarkets.
It is understood that Labour plans to order hospital chief executives to use some of their funding to buy spare capacity in care homes, pay for carers to assist patients in their own homes or top up salaries of social care staff to make it a more attractive profession.
Mr Streeting said some hospital bosses are already reaping the benefits after using their NHS funding to support social care providers in their area.
But he wants to see this happen nationally and said Labour will ensure that NHS and social care work together to ‘spend money more effectively than they currently do’.
‘I went to St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington this month where a patient had been stuck in hospital for 60 days, despite being well enough to leave because the care wasn’t available,’ he told the event in central London.
‘Not only is that a waste of that patient’s time and life, it is a waste of taxpayers’ money.’
In his speech, Mr Streeting also vowed that 95 per cent of patients attending A&E will be admitted, transferred or sent home within four hours in the first term of a Labour government – a target that has not been met since July 2015.
The latest figures show only 74 per cent of patients were seen within four hours in A&Es last month.
The Conservatives gave hospitals a one-off payment of £200 million in January last year to buy places in care homes, with a view to freeing up 2,500 beds so patients could be admitted faster from A&E.