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
Is there such a thing as a “neutral” accent, and if so what does it sound like? And that quirk in the way southern Californians talk about freeways. They’ll say things like take the 405 and get on the 8. Why the definite article...
Floordrobe is the new word for an old habit: piling your clothes on the floor instead of putting them away. The Oxford English Dictionary recently added an entry for it, defining floordrobe as “an untidy heap of discarded clothing left on the floor...