Timeliness of Acute Hospital Discharges (Discharge Ready Date) for November 2025
The Discharge Ready Date (DRD) publication reports on patients that were discharged in a given month and if they were timely based on the day they become medically optimised for discharge (their ‘Discharge Ready Date’). The results are presented at Acute NHS Trust, Integrated Care Board (ICB),Upper Tier Local Authority (UTLA), NHS Region and national level.
Applies to England
Documents
Details
The discharge ready date records the start date of the final period that the patient no longer meets the ‘Criteria to Reside*’ in a hospital bed for their episode of care. The key aims for this commitment are to publish new information that allows is to better measure and understand discharge delays.
Previous published data has been based on the number of patients in hospital on a given day who are medically optimised for discharge but have not been discharged by the end of that day. The new dataset shows what proportion of people are discharged on the day they are medically optimised for discharge, and a breakdown of the different lengths of stay beyond this date. The intention is to provide better data on how long patients are waiting to leave hospital after their discharge ready date so that local systems can work together to reduce those waits.
This publication includes only those trusts providing acceptable data throughout the reporting period. The suite of metrics report on the percentage of discharges within certain thresholds, the total bed days after discharge ready date for patients discharged within certain thresholds and the average days from Discharge Ready Date to date of discharge (excluding 0 day delays).
The publication includes trust level data and data disaggregated by Upper Tier Local Authority (UTLA), and then by trust. This data shows the percentage of discharges within certain thresholds and bed days lost for UTLA residents (based on the postcode of the patient) discharged from those trusts in the last month.
Official statistics are produced impartially and free from any political influence.