A new study suggests the sharp rise in the death rate in recent years in England and Wales could be due to the number of people being kept too long in hospital, inadequate social care and austerity-linked pressures on the NHS, writes The Guardian. Academics who have studied death rates and the performance of the NHS and social care systems during that time believe that a fifth of the extra deaths in 2014-15 – about 7,800 in all – may have been directly attributable to patients being stuck in hospital.
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