The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Delayed transfers of older people from hospital: Causes and policy implications
Open accessAbstract
Health and social care agencies in the UK. have been under pressure for some time to reduce delayed transfers of older people from hospital because they absorb scarce health service resources and incur a human cost through inappropriate placement. A local study based on an analysis of records and interviews with managers showed that delays reflect the complex needs of older people, and arise from financing and organisational problems at both the planning and implementation stages of a discharge. Family resistance may also be a factor. Budgetary constraints result in delays in confirming public support for some clients. Shortages of professional staff and care assistants limit the provision of domiciliary packages. The contraction of the residential sector has reduced the availability of beds and increased the cost of care home placements. Scope exists for expediting administrative aspects of transfers by coordinating health and social services. More recent legislation that imposes fines on social service departments for delayed transfers does not address underlying causes.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
No references could be resolved yet.
Research works printed but not linked: 12
- Falconer, 1991, Waiting for placement: an exploratory analysis of the determinants of delayed discharges of elderly hospital patients, Health Services Research, 26, 359
- Lewis, 1988, The blocked bed: a prospective study, New Zealand Medical Journal, 101, 575
- Vetter, 2003, Inappropriately delayed discharge from hospital: what do we know?, British Medical Journal, 326, 927, 10.1136/bmj.326.7395.927 · DOI
- Laing and Buisson Laing's healthcare market review 2002–3. London; 2003 · DOI
- Forder, 2000, The price of placements in residential and nursing home care: the effects of contracts and competition, Health Economics, 9, 634, 10.1002/1099-1050(200010)9:7<643::AID-HEC528>3.0.CO;2-X · DOI
- Jacobs, 2001, The twilight zone. NHS services for older people in residential nursing homes, Quality in Ageing – Policy, Practice and Research, 2, 3, 10.1108/14717794200100012 · DOI
- Chalkley, 1998, Contracting for health services when patient demand does not reflect quality, Journal of Health Economics, 17, 1, 10.1016/S0167-6296(97)00019-2 · DOI
- Rowland, 2004, Choice and responsiveness for older people in the “patient-centred” NHS, British Medical Journal, 328, 4, 10.1136/bmj.328.7430.4 · DOI
- Patterson, 1999, The effectiveness of predischarge home assessment visits: a systematic review, Clinical Rehabilitation, 13, 101, 10.1191/026921599670206925 · DOI
- Hyde, 2000, The effects of supported discharge from hospital to home in older people, Age and Ageing, 29, 1, 10.1093/ageing/29.3.271 · DOI
- Rummery, 2003, Primary health and social care services in the UK: progress towards partnership, Social Science and Medicine, 56, 1773, 10.1016/S0277-9536(02)00173-9 · DOI
- McDonagh, 2000, Measuring appropriate usage of acute beds. A systematic review of methods and results, Health Policy, 58, 157, 10.1016/S0168-8510(00)00092-0 · DOI
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Basu, K. (2026) · Hospital Topics · doi:10.1080/00185868.2025.2474761 · Cited by 3
“ALC also increases patients’ risk of hospital-acquired infections and can lead to cognitive and physical declines, particularly in older adults (Bryan, Gage, and Gilbert 2006; Ontario Health 2021).”
Metadata
- Authors
- Bryan, K., Gage, H., & Gilbert, K.
- Affiliations
- University of Surrey (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Bryan, Karen
- Venue
- Health Policy
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2006-04
- Volume
- 76
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 194-201
- ISSN
- 0168-8510 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2095483662
- Cited by
- 40
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2025: 1 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 2 · 2018: 5 · 2017: 2 · 2016: 1 · 2015: 3 · 2014: 2 · 2013: 3 · 2012: 2
- FWCI
- 0.00
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- orcid.org
- Locations
- Health Policy (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Surrey Research Insight Open Access (The University of Surrey) (submittedVersion)
- Research at York St John (York St John University) (submittedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Greenwich Academic Literature Archive (University of Greenwich) (submittedVersion)
- SHURA (Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive) (Sheffield Hallam University) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › General Health Professions › Health Services Management and Policy
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Geriatrics and Gerontology › Geriatric Care and Nursing Homes
- Social Sciences › Health › Healthcare innovation and challenges
- Keywords
- delayed transfer, older adults, hospital discharge, care homes, residential care, home care, care assistants, health and social care coordination, family resistance, discharge planning, social care legislation, health care financing
- MeSH terms
- Aged, United Kingdom, Humans, Patient Transfer, State Medicine, Time Factors, Organizational Policy
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
