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
00:50because they don't have appropriate care or a place to go. New South Wales Health Minister,
00:56Ryan Park, says these people deserve better.
00:59In 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 up
01:07line with the people cannot access on a mild health care placement.
01:11Now, a new inquiry will look into the cost and impacts of having so many older patients
01:17stranded in hospitals across the state due to a lack of aged care beds which is overseen by the
01:23federal government. This issue doesn't just affect older people and their families. As more patients
01:30are less stranded, public hospitals are running out of beds for others. This is known as bed block
01:37because wards and emergency departments struggle and treatment times blow out as hospitals battle to
01:45treat patients with less beds available. Whether you want to call it bed block, stranded patients or
01:51people who are homeless in hospital, this issue is growing and leaves those who can't afford to wait
01:57in limbo for months on end.
02:15know it is over.
02:15Now, all of the work to be in them, that is
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