00:00Across Australia, thousands of older people are being left stranded in public hospitals.
00:06After going into hospital due to falls or illnesses, many older people are unable to
00:11return home as they don't have appropriate care. But with no aged care beds available,
00:17they get stuck. One of these people is Lynette Bishop. The 84-year-old who has dementia became
00:25literally homeless in Wollongong Hospital. She was deemed unfit to return home and had to give
00:31up her public housing unit. Some people wait so many months in hospital that they have died
00:37before getting a spot in a nursing home. On any given day in the Illawarra where there is a shortage
00:43of 1000 aged care beds, between 100 and 150 people are in public hospitals unable to be discharged
00:51because they don't have appropriate care or a place to go. New South Wales Health Minister Ryan Park
00:57says these people deserve better. In a statement showing the scale of the problem, he said,
01:03every day in New South Wales there is the equivalent of an entire hospital taken offline because people
01:08cannot access Commonwealth aged care placements. Now, a new inquiry will look into the cost and
01:15impacts of having so many older patients stranded in hospitals across the state due to a lack of aged
01:21care beds, which is overseen by the Federal Government. This issue doesn't just affect older
01:27people and their families. As more patients are left stranded, public hospitals are running out of beds
01:33for others. This is known as bed block because wards and emergency departments struggle and treatment times
01:42blow out as hospitals battle to treat patients with less beds available. Whether you want to call it bed
01:49block, stranded patients or people who are homeless in hospital, this issue is growing and leaves those
01:56who can't afford to wait in limbo for months on end.
02:12you
