THE number of people stuck in a hospital bed despite being fit enough to leave increased again last year, adding to the criticism of Health Secretary Jeane Freeman.

Official Scottish NHS figures showed there were 1451 people subject to a delayed discharge in May, a four per cent rise on the same census point in 2018.

Of these, 1181 were delayed more than three days, with health and social care reasons responsible for 884 delays (75%), complex needs for 264 delays (22%) and patient and family-related reasons 33 (3%).

A total of 45,061 days were lost to so-called bed blocking in May, again up 4% in a year. The daily average of beds blocked was 1454 in May, compared to 1,366 in April.

With each delay costing £234 per day, the bill for May was £10.5m.

In February 2015, Ms Freeman’s predecessor Shona Robison said she wanted to “eradicate delayed discharge out of the system” that year, but it is a stubborn problem.

Ms Freeman previously admitted the figures are “not good enough”, giving health boards £27m last year to help tackle the problem, which is linked to a lack of social care places.

Tory MSP Miles Briggs accused the SNP of failing to get to grips with the problem.

He said: “Delayed discharge is a serious issue which is bad for patients and ends up costing our NHS millions of pounds a year.

“We need to start tackling this, but instead we have seen no direction from the SNP on how to improve social care and allow these people to leave hospital. Jeane Freeman said that addressing delayed discharge was her number one priority. A year into the job and the situation is getting worse on her watch.”

Labour MSP Monica Lennon said: “Despite promising to end delayed discharge, people are waiting too long to access social care.

“The SNP Government is failing to turn this around and each delayed discharge is a drain on NHS resources and is needlessly putting people at risk of hospital-acquired infections.

“In the month of May alone this cost our NHS more than £10million - that’s money that could be spent on medicines, more staff and new equipment.

“This is no reflection on the hardworking staff but the performance of our NHS is worsening under Jeane Freeman. The integration of health and social care services will not succeed unless SNP Ministers make the right resources available.”

LibDem MP Alex Cole-Hamilton added: “The Health Secretary should be embarrassed that so many patients are stuck in hospital when they’re well enough to go home, simply because the government hasn’t given care services the resources they need.

“The scarcity of community care packages is stacking more and more pressure on beds in front line services. We already know that when patients are trapped in hospital their physical health and mental wellbeing often deteriorate.”

The Government said: “People should not need to spend unnecessary time in hospital once treatment is complete. That is why we are investing more than £700m this year to support social care and the integration of health and social care services.

“We are continuing to work closely with health and social care partnerships to ensure the good practice which exists in many areas is spread across Scotland.”