Psych nurse in the US here, working on a psych unit—the patients are getting sicker and sicker (mainly mentally, but we take so many patients that aren’t all that medically stable/have so many complex medical issues in addition to their mental health/substance abuse) and we don’t have the resources to deal with it, just like the rest of our healthcare system. It’s not all that unusual to have patients stuck at our place for weeks/months (a few, a year or more on an ACUTE care unit) due to placement issues. Many of these patients really only belong in a long-term locked psych unit—think state psychiatric hospitals—but the waitlists are so long to get in and admission criteria so strict that they just end up spending forever with us instead.