Lincolnshire health chiefs say strikes are to blame for slowing hospital discharges
Lincolnshire’s Better Care Fund reports progress but warns delayed discharges, linked to staff strikes and rising demand, strains system
Last updated 10th Dec 2025
Health bosses have partly blamed striking staff for delays in patients being sent home from hospital.
The Better Care Fund (BCF) is a national programme which supports local health, housing and social care services and aims to provide a more integrated approach between the various service to try to make life better for patients.
Members of Lincolnshire County Council’s health and wellbeing board heard – at a meeting on Tuesday, December 9 – that while the BCF was on track to meet most of its targets in Lincolnshire, some challenges remained. One of these comes in the amount of time someone stays in hospital after they are ready to go home.
Paul Summers, programme manager of the Better Care Fund, said: “Metrics are on the track for the vast majority, apart from a couple of areas around our average number of days in DRD (Discharge Ready Date) and the average length of discharge.
“These are due to a number of other factors such as increased numbers throughout the summer and kind of some of the industrial action which happened around the same time.
“To mitigate that, Optica is a tracking system that the group is inputting which will help us focus on discharge and help to increase the performance around that, which we should start to see an improvement in those figures as we move forward.”
Mr Summers added that the BCF was also working to improve the accuracy of its data.
He went on to say that the BCF in Lincolnshire was performing better in most areas than the average for England.
Mr Summers added: “The plan, therefore, is for emphasis to be placed on locally commissioned services and their alignment within those neighbourhood health plans.
“I guess the key areas for us to focus on will be to continue to align with the four key areas that they’ve talked about as part of that which are emission advance, intermediate care and discharge and rehab and reablement.”
He said that the BCF was also developing a “neighbourhood health plan” for Lincolnshire on how it intends to address delays in patients being discharged from hospital.