THE revelation today that hundreds of people are being discharged far too soon from East Lancashire hospitals will strike a chord with the unwanted experience of many patients and their families.

Indeed, according to a 12-month probe into discharges from Blackburn Infirmary and Queen's Park Hospital, almost a quarter of relatives on the receiving end, and a third of residential home owners, felt patients were being sent home when they were still unfit.

This is also the belief of many health workers in the back-up system - district nurses, health visitors and others.

But what is disturbing is the virtual admission by health chiefs that, though not desirable, this is the system.

Yet is not this situation simply one that puts quantity before quality?

It is all very well reducing waiting lists by increasing throughput, and for politicians to boast of more patients being treated than ever before.

But the literally painful reality is that cuts in the number of beds - thousands of which have been axed nationwide in recent years - and increased hospital workloads are producing ill effects as a result of this dubious gain.

Not only do we see recurring scrambles for beds that leave patients waiting hours on trolleys for admission to the ward or involve them being shunted, expensively and distressingly, to far-off hospitals.

But we are also evidently witnessing a reduction in the calibre of hospital health care, with the buck being picked up by patients' families and second-stage health services, arguably at no benefit in either efficiency or expense to the NHS at the end of the day.

It is debatable whether patients prefer the questionable advantage of spending less time waiting to get into hospital if the upshot is that they stand to get less than the full treatment or care they need when they get there.

But it is also uncertain whether the revised discharge policy, which the Blackburn hospitals' trust has drafted in the light of this report's findings, can bring marked improvements when the real influence on policy - the pressure to reduce waiting lists while bed and staffing levels are mis-matched with that goal - remains in place.

It is a situation the new health minister must address with urgency.

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