bed-blocker
n.— «The son said she was not going to be moved. He was happy to pay for chronic care, but not for the six weeks of nursing care that the consultant had deemed necessary for the acute incident.…I can vouch for this story because Biddy is my mother, and I am the son who refused to move her. I confess that I suffered twinges of guilt in my stand. I realised she would be classified as a “bed blocker.”» —“NHS withdrawal from continuing care” by Malcolm Dean The Lancet (U.K.) Aug. 29, 1992. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...
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