No more bed blocking

doi:10.1136/bmj.324.7331.247a

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Colin Douglas, doctor and novelist

Edinburgh

Here in the Greater Auchendreich Health Board area—where recent reorganisation has brought together primary care and acute services, along with strong and welcome board-level input from our colleagues in the world of social work—bed-blocking is no more.

Instead it is called delayed discharge, but despite the welcome advance in nomenclature the statistics remain depressingly familiar. Already cynics are muttering that our latest reorganisation can do little to address one of the central issues faced …