WHEN she was Health Secretary, Nicola Sturgeon was vigorously determined to tackle delayed discharge in the NHS. Not only did it waste resources by taking up valuable bed space – “equivalent to a large acute hospital being occupied all year by people who don’t need to be there” at a cost of £50million – as she put it at the SNP conference in 2011, it also robbed old people of their quality of life.

“We must do more to tackle these unnecessary waits,” she told delegates. By the start of 2015, under this SNP Government, no older person will be unnecessarily delayed in hospital for any longer than two weeks.”

But announcing things is the easy part; the reality has fallen well short of the rhetoric. In the first full year after Ms Sturgeon’s speech, there were just under 492,000 bed days lost to delayed discharge, with 9,221 cases involved. Last year there were 568,000 days lost and 14,186 cases.

As to her announcement that no older person would be delayed in hospital longer than a fortnight, half of all cases still involve people stuck in bed longer than this.

The reasons are many and complex. Around 70 per cent of patients affected by delayed discharge last year were aged 75 or above.

Around a quarter were waiting for their council to arrange social care support so they could live in their own home. Around the same number were waiting for a place in a care home. Some 20 per cent were waiting for a social care assessment or funding for a care home.

Most of the rest involved complex delays involving very specific care needs, including adults incapable of making decisions for themselves.

Reducing delayed discharge will therefore always be an uphill struggle.

But new figures obtained by Labour from health boards under freedom of information show the necessity of making that effort, and of doing so urgently.

They show that in the 19 months after the current Health Secretary, Shona Robison, said she would eradicate the problem, almost 700 people died while on delayed discharge lists.

It goes without saying people die on a daily basis in hospitals. But these patients, it must be remembered, were previously deemed well enough to leave.

Yet while waiting to return to their homes, families and friends, their condition deteriorated and they ended their days on a ward.

Delayed discharge is unfortunately about far more than logistics and freeing up beds for new patients – it makes people sick, exposing them to infections they might otherwise avoid.

The Scottish Government says there is evidence a delay longer than just 72 hours can lead to “worse outcomes” for patients compared to those who go home sooner.

The SNP has promised an extra £100m over three years to address delayed discharge thought that has to be weighed against much greater council budget cuts.

The continued poor statistics, and the human misery behind them, indicate Ms Sturgeon and Ms Robison need to do far more before they can made a genuinely credible announcement about bringing delayed discharge under control.