A MAN who was in hospital for 99 days refused to leave despite a clean bill of health - and even ordered in takeaways, the Daily Echo can reveal.

The average cost of a hospital bed is £400 a day so his stay is estimated to have cost the taxpayer £39,600.

The staggering case comes as the British Medical Association has warned the bed blocking crisis is worse than ever as staff struggle to find beds for incoming patients.

Latest figures from Poole Hospital revealed in just one week alone 70 patients had been at the hospital more than seven days despite being medically fit to leave. That equates to 35 per cent of the total number of patients who have been in hospital for seven days or more.

The ‘bed blocker’ was admitted to Poole Hospital last year but ‘chose not to leave’ despite a clean bill of health.

If the discharge back to his home had not been successful, the hospital admitted it would have been forced to take the case to court and evict him through a court order.

However, he returned home where a care package was put in place – and hospital staff, including senior managers, even ensured electricians and gas engineers were there to carry out necessary work in a bid to get him home.

The hospital has not disclosed details about his age, the reason he was in hospital and when he was deemed ‘medically fit for discharge’ due to ‘patient confidentiality’.

Mark Mould, chief operating officer of Poole Hospital, said: “I think it becomes a challenge when they start ordering food from a local shop and having it delivered to hospital.

“The challenge is everybody believes the hospital can just put a person on a trolley and discharge them once they are medically fit.

“We can’t do that.

“If a patient chooses not to move onto a trolley, the whole discharge can fail because we cannot physically move someone.

“If it had failed on the day, we would have had to have gone through the court process to get possession of the bed.

“These cases do not happen all the time but that level of complexity is about the very small group of people who actually decide they don’t want to leave.”

Normally bed blocking, when a patient experiences a delayed discharge despite being medically fit to leave hospital, occurs due to a number of reasons including waiting on a community care assessment, waiting for adaptations to be carried out at home or waiting on a place in a care home.

Cases where patients refuse to leave hospital are rare. Elsewhere in the country, hospitals have resorted to applying to the court for a possession order to claim back its bed.

CEO of Poole Hospital Debbie Fleming said the hospital works to discharge patients from hospital into a more appropriate setting once treatment is complete.

She said: “I think once upon a time in the health service a patient could stay weeks and weeks in hospital. We can’t allow that to happen.

“You can’t allow people to just stay in hospital while they make up their minds about care, for example.

“The discharge is complex because there are often a lot of reasons for the delays but we know a lot of the time we are waiting for a package of care for people in their own home. That’s the main reason. After that it is older people needing a care home or a nursing home placement.

“However delayed discharges do affect the entire hospital.

“I hope there will be some signs that national policy is being looked at and reviewed. I would want to see more resources put into social care now.

“That, for me, is the priority. The impact for us is so big when we haven’t got the resources out there.”