A hospital trust is to fund 30 nursing home places to ease its long-running bed-blocking crisis.

Officials at East Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust said they risk piling further financial pressure on themselves by paying for the places. Bosses said they would have to find the money through trust funds but responsibility for paying for the places lay with East Sussex social services - which has been accused of failing in its statutory duty to fund places.

Trust officials said something had to be done to lower the number of beds occupied by people fit for discharge but with nowhere to go.

The trust, which runs the Eastbourne District General Hospital (DGH) and the Conquest Hospital, St Leonards, has been under unprecedented stress during the past two months. In the past seven weeks, 140 operations have been cancelled on the day of surgery and more have been cancelled a day or two before.

An average of 63 beds a week have been occupied by bed-blockers, peaking at 82 beds on May 12. The trust has applied to Eastbourne Borough Council to build a 34-bed ward on the DGH car park by July.

Now under the new plan, 15 beds from both the DGH and the Conquest will be freed up. But the trust said about 33 beds would still be blocked - three times the national average.

Director of operations Graham Griffiths said: "This is not a decision we have taken lightly. It is in response to the considerable pressures being felt by staff due to high occupancy levels across both hospitals.

"There have been considerable numbers of patients booked for an operation, many of whom require urgent surgery, who have regrettably been cancelled over recent weeks. For our patients' sake, we cannot allow this situation to continue.

"We will be ring-fencing our surgical capacity for those patients requiring surgery at the expense of putting additional financial pressure on our hospital budget."

The move puts more pressure on East Sussex County Council. It has been accused of not fulfilling its statutory duty to find nursing home places for patients fit for hospital discharge.

Before the General Election, health minister Rosie Winterton told Parliament the Tory-run council was keeping pensioners in hospital.

Council leader Peter Jones insisted there was no deliberate policy to block beds.