BED-blocking is at its highest rate in four years, with most of those affected being delayed by a shortage of available care home places or because they were awaiting funding to pay for a care home placement.
Figures reveal the number of patients in Scotland waiting more than six weeks to be discharged has tripled over the past year.
A total of 274 had waited more than four weeks to be discharged from hospital in July, up from 118 a year ago. It included 175 patients who waited more than six weeks to be discharged, against 59 the previous July.
It comes as the Scottish Government prepares to cut its bed-blocking target again next April, when no patient will be expected to wait longer than two weeks to be discharged.
The Government said it had set up a task force with the Convention Of Scottish Local Authorities (Cosla) to tackle the problem and make "immediate improvements".
Health Secretary Alex Neil said: "We have come a considerable way in tackling this problem, with comparable figures for 2006 showing three times as many people were delayed for more than four weeks. However, it is disappointing some patients are still delayed for lengthy periods in our hospitals."
Councillor Peter Johnston, Cosla's health spokesman, said: "This is a priority of the first order - we know that for older people, in particular, a delay of longer than 72 hours can have an impact on their health and wellbeing.
"We in Cosla are determined to make further progress on discharge arrangements. We hope to get to a position where service redesign can build community capacity to ensure people are only admitted to hospital because they really need to be there and are then discharged speedily back to their homes."
Between April and June there were 894 people fit to leave hospital, but with nowhere else to go, resulting in nearly 150,000 bed days being lost to bed-blocking.
There were also 308 "Code 9" patients - those with complex needs - including 46 who had been stuck in hospital for six months or more. Eight of those have been waiting more than a year to be discharged to another setting.
Jackson Carlaw, the Scottish Conservatives' health spokesman and deputy leader, said: "The problem of delayed discharge just gets worse and worse."
Jim Hume , health spokesman for the Scottish LibDems, said: "The vast majority of these patients are over 75 and many are awaiting a care home place in their community."
Meanwhile, the figures from Information Services Division Scotland also revealed only one of the country's 14 health boards is consistently meeting accident and emergency waiting time targets.
National standards state at least 98% of people in A&E should be admitted, transferred for treatment or discharged from hospital within four hours. Only NHS Tayside achieved this target every month from April to June.
Earlier this month, The Herald's Time For Action campaign on NHS care found patients with long-term health problems are waiting months for rehabilitation services to help them live independently. The report found delays existed of up to 36 weeks before people received a visit from trained staff.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article