A NORTH Yorkshire nursing home manager today pointed to four empty beds and declared: "Don't blame us for causing bed blocking at York District Hospital."

Susan Woodcock, of Beechwood Place Nursing Home, Norton, is bewildered by claims that a lack of nursing home beds is causing a hospital bottleneck.

She said she wrote to City of York social services before Christmas to tell them of vacancies because she was aware of winter difficulties arising at York.

"I followed up by writing to the district liaison nurse at York District Hospital on January 2 to report the availability of three of our beds - a shared male room on the first floor and a single ground-floor room, but I was told that they could not take advantage of it because the monthly allocation of money, based on a points system, had run out. And as long as that remained the case, no one was getting moved from the hospital. Money is at the root of this."

Mrs Woodcock said the number of available beds at Beechwood Place had since risen to four. Council and health managers in York blamed a lack of nursing home beds in part for overcrowding at YDH after former general surgeon John Craven said this week the problem there was the worst he had ever seen.

Mrs Woodcock said: "There are a number of other private nursing homes in exactly the same circumstances.

"The Government must take some responsibility for the way in which money has been allocated."

Bill Hodson, senior assistant director of strategic services at City of York Council, said: "We do know Mrs Woodcock has vacancies, but we rarely have a York resident who wants to go to the Norton area.

"Of the 48 people waiting for beds at the moment in York, ten are North Yorkshire residents. Most people want to stay where they have always lived."

He said the points allocation system she had been told about related to North Yorkshire County Council's social services department.

Rosemary Archer, director of social services at North Yorkshire, said the council had increased the number of placements it could make under its monthly points system just before Christmas and this increase remained in place. But she said that there was no pressure from hospitals for discharge in the Ryedale, Scarborough and Whitby area. We have sufficient resources to meet the pressures from Scarborough District Hospital at the moment and we are not aware of any requests from York for a place in Norton."

A spokesman for York NHS Trust said: "We are continuing to work with local authorities to look at a number of ways of reducing the number of delayed discharges. We are very aware of the issues."

* Twenty staff and patients on a ward at York District Hospital have been struck down by a stomach virus, being treated as the Norwalk virus, causing vomiting, diarrhoea and fever.

Updated: 10:36 Thursday, January 24, 2002