The availability of long-stay hospital beds for the elderly in Otago and Southland is tight and demand is increasing, but private providers are not queueing up to install new beds.
Otago and Southland district health boards' regional funding and planning general manager David Chrisp said there was not an immediate problem, but the situation was tight.
Some people were waiting for hospital-level beds, but they were not necessarily waiting for very long, he told the boards' disability support advisory committee.
Committee chairman Neville Cook said district health boards could not order aged-care providers to add long-stay hospital beds, or where to put them, but people continued to believe they could.
The boards provided the funding.
He was commenting on a report from Mr Chrisp which stated that in this financial year it was expected 16 more people in Otago and Southland would require hospital-level care than did last year.
In Otago, the number of funded hospital bed days was increasing at about the rate the demand for rest-home beds was decreasing.
The average length of stay in such beds was 400 days, which did not appear to have changed much in four years.
About 10 more people this year would need hospital care and 15-20 fewer would require rest-home care compared with in 2007-08.
In Southland, the rate of annual decline in funded rest-home bed days was slightly higher than the demand for funded hospital beds.
About six more people are expected to need hospital-level care this year, while 12-15 fewer people will need rest-home care.
Mr Chrisp said in the past four years there had been a doubling of the number of home support hours allocated which would have had an impact on the number of people in residential care.
Committee member Louise Carr said the availability of staffing for hospital-level beds was one reason providers were reluctant to provide such beds.
Committee member Helen Algar asked for more information to be provided to the committee, giving a synopsis of the aged-care sector and details of how the board planned to cater for the predicted quadrupling of the number of over 85-year-olds in the next 20 years.
