Patients spent 4,922 days awaiting discharge

Patients who were medically fit to leave spent nearly 5,000 days in hospital beds last year due to a lack of available ongoing care, a Freedom of Information (FOI) request has found.

Health department data said the number of days patients spent at Jersey's General Hospital waiting for ongoing care was 4,922 in 2025, with more than 2,000 of those days because patients were waiting for a bed in a nursing home.

While the total went down in 2025 compared to the year before, there were about 1,000 patients impacted by the delays.

Health Minister Tom Binet said the government was working with care providers to make sure every bed was available and utilised so capacity could be maximised.

The FOI said it was "not possible to report upon the costs associated with delayed transfers of care" because it did not hold records which allowed it to calculate how much medically fit patients staying in hospital actually cost the department.

Binet said there had not been enough investment "for a very long period of time".

He added the level of investment needed was "going to take four years to solve the bulk of it".

"There will still be some problems at the end of that time, so we're looking in terms of the total picture at probably a 10-year time frame," Binet added.

"I'm hoping the bulk of the problems can be solved in four years."

In March, the government introduced charges of more than £500 a day for patients who remained in hospital after being declared fit for discharge.

The FOI said the charge was intended to "encourage patients who are ready to be discharged and have a suitable package of care arranged to move to a more appropriate care setting, helping to keep hospital beds available for those who need them".

"Now that it sits there, people are aware of it and they seem to have, the ones that it does involve, have suddenly found a way to take up the places that have been offered to them," Binet said.

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