A man spends two years in a hospital rejecting all other options offered to him before having to be evicted by the courts from his bed – that’s satire from The Onion, right? Surely?

That was my initial reaction to the story of Adriano Guedes and his lengthy spell as a resident at the James Paget Hospital in Norfolk. I was once an outpatient there and counted an escape within two hours as a result (although that’s true of any hospital).

Guedes, a 63-year-old stroke victim, told the BBC that he had tried to vacate his bed, only to be forced to stay because the accommodation he was offered wasn’t appropriate to his condition and the disabilities it caused, and he had nowhere else to go.

Anna Hills, director of governance at the hospital, popped up in an attempt to draw a line under the conversation, saying that “as a compassionate organisation, the James Paget worked throughout in partnership with a range of agencies to achieve a safe discharge from the hospital. These included the local authority and social care and, as far as possible, Guedes, his family and friends. Detailed planning took place which led to a successful discharge in this complex case.”

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So that’s fine, then. Move along, nothing to see here, it’s a case of “he said, she said” that’s now been resolved (with a bit of help from the courts). Britain, eh. Bonkers! Now where have they put the crossword?

I don’t know the full facts about how Guedes came to spend two years in a bed, but I have come across similar situations. I’ve seen cases where a person with disabilities or with special needs has been left in a Kafkaesque nightmare over the issue of finding a place to live, being offered so-called “suitable” accommodation which is actually anything but.

When a council or housing association wants to knock a building down so it can be redeveloped, all those living in it have to be rehoused. If one of the residents is disabled, housing officials may offer them a new home without considering whether there’s space to turn a wheelchair around in the hall, or railings installed to get into the bath.

They might eventually find somewhere that seems appropriate, but an occupational therapist could initially disagree and by the time they decide it’s suitable, the place will have been snatched up by someone else.

Meanwhile the agency responsible for the building starts to exert pressure: it wants everybody out. Suddenly it starts to get nasty. Threatening letters are dispatched because the resident allegedly has been offered “suitable accommodation”.

The people handling the search for a new home for the resident might stop answering the phone, and letters, threats and more letters fly back and forth and as the situation rapidly deteriorates.

Did something like this happen in the case of Guedes and the James Paget Hospital?

According to a piece published by The Times on the same day Guedes talked to the BBC, thousands of chronically ill patients could be forced out of their homes because in some areas the health service will no longer pay for carers to visit them if it would be cheaper to secure them a place in a care home.

Thousands of people may be forced into living in places that might be unsuitable, shuffled off into a grim warehouse operated by a for-profit company determined to keep costs down even if that means running a place that might make a prison camp seem preferable.

7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people Show all 7 1 /7 7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people 7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people Closing Remploy factories The Work and Pensions Secretary called time on Britain’s system of Remploy factories, which provided subsidised and sheltered employment to disabled people. People employed at the factories protested against their closure and said they provided gainful work. “Is it a kindness to stick people in some factory where they are not doing any work at all? Just making cups of coffee?” Mr Duncan Smith said at the time, defending the decision. “I promise you this is better.” The Remploy organisation was privatised and sold to American workfare provider Maximus, with the majority of the organisation’s factories closed. The future of the remaining sites is unclear 7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people Scrapping the Independent Living Fund The £320m Independent Living Fund was established in 1988 to give financial support to people with disabilities. It was scrapped on July 1 2015, with 18,000 often severely disabled people losing out by an average of £300 a week. The money was generally used to help pay for carers so people could live in communities rather than institutions. Councils will get a boost in funding to compensate but it will not cover the whole cost of the fund. This new cash also doesn’t have to be spent on the disabled 7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people Cut payments for the disabled Access To Work scheme Iain Duncan Smith is bringing forward a policy that will reduce payments to some disabled people from a scheme designed to help them into work. The £108m scheme, which helps 35,540 people, will be capped on a per-used basis, potentially hitting those with the more serious disabilities who currently receive the most help. The single biggest users of the fund are people who have difficulty seeing and hearing. The cut will come in from October 2015. The charity Disability UK says the scheme actually makes the Government money because the people who gain access to work tend pay tax that more than covers its cost. The DWP does not describe the reduction as a “cut” and says it will be able to spread the money more thinly and cover more people 7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people Cut Employment and Support Allowance The latest Budget included a £30 a week cut in disability benefits for some new claimants of Employment and Support Allowance (ESA). The Government says it is equalising the rate of disability benefits with Jobseekers Allowance because giving disabled people more help is a “perverse incentive”. The people affected by this cut are those assessed as having a limited capability for work but as being capable of some “work-related activity”. A group of prominent Catholics wrote to Mr Duncan Smith to say there was “no justification” for this cut. Mental health charity Mind, said the cut was “insulting and misguided” 7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people Risk homelessness with a sharp increase disability benefit sanctions Official figures in the first quarter of 2014 found a huge increase in sanctions against people reliant on ESA sickness benefit. The 15,955 sanctions were handed out in that period compared to 3,574 in the same period the year before, 2013 – a 4.5 times increase. The homelessness charity Crisis warned at the time that the sharp rise in temporary benefit cuts was “cruel and can leave people utterly destitute – without money even for food and at severe risk of homelessness”. “It is difficult to see how they are meant to help people prepare for work,” Matt Downie, director of policy at the charity added 7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people Sending sick people to work because of broken fitness to work tests In 2012 a government advisor appointed to review the Government’s Work Capability Assessment said the tests causing suffering by sending sick people back to work inappropriately. “There are certainly areas where it's still not working and I am sorry there are people going through a system which I think still needs improvement,” Professor Malcolm Harrington concluded. The tests are said to have improved since then, but as recently as this summer they are still coming in for criticism. In June the British Psychological Society said there was “now significant body of evidence that the WCA is failing to assess people’s fitness for work accurately and appropriately”. It called for a full overhaul of the way the tests are carried out. The WCA appeals system has also been fraught with controversy with a very high rate of overturns and delays lasting months and blamed for hardship 7 ways the Tories have ‘helped’ disabled people The bedroom tax The Government’s benefit cut for people who it says are “under-occupying” their homes disproportionately affects disabled people. Statistics released last year show that around two-thirds of those affected by the under-occupancy penalty, widely known as the ‘bedroom tax’, are disabled. There have been a number of high profile cases of disabled people being moved out of specially adapted homes by the policy. In one case publicised by the Sunday People last week, a 48 year old man with cerebral palsy was forced to bathe in a paddling pool after the tax moved him out of his home with a walk-in shower. The Government says it has provided councils with a discretionary fund to help reduce the policy’s impact on disabled people, but cases continue to arise

We can’t be sure whether this happened in Guedes’s case. What we do know is that a wide range of organisations have been highlighting a funding crisis in the health service, exacerbated by an even bigger crisis in social care, which has been ignored by the Government to the extent that it has reached a tipping point.

While Guedes’s case is extreme, so-called “bed blocking” – where people occupy NHS beds because there is nowhere else for them – has become commonplace.

We also know that is that there is a chronic lack of social housing in this country, something else a wide number of organisations have been highlighting. The Government has repeatedly failed to hit its own targets for building, and has compounded the situation through a mad policy of subsidising the sale of council and housing association homes to people lucky enough to be able to afford mortgages.

That shortage is exacerbated when it comes to people with specific requirements that make lots of places unsuitable for them to live in.

When you take these issues into consideration, Guedes's story doesn't seem to be quite as crazy as it did at first.