Waiting list numbers for a place in a local nursing home or for home nursing support continue to soar, reaching nearly 14,000 people by July, the NRC reported on Friday.

The total of people looking for a place in a home near to their current address or for care services has risen by over 1,000 since February, and 4,000 people have been waiting for more than six months.

The shortage of nurses and the increase in demand due to the aging population have contributed to the problem, the paper said.

‘This is a crisis situation,’ Jeroen van den Oever, from nursing organisation Fundis, told the paper. ‘We have 60 vacancies out of 800 district nurses and sometimes we have to tell a patient ‘no’.’