Following emergency talks over the weekend, the Health and Social Care Secretary, Steve Barclay will today announce a funding package of up to £200m for the NHS to buy short-term care placements in care homes and other settings. The initiative aims to allow patients who are medically fit for discharge to be moved into community care settings, where they will receive the care they need to recover before returning to their homes. It will ease the bed blocking that is having a knock-on effect throughout the system, causing huge pressure in emergency departments and long ambulance handover delays. There are currently around 13,000 people occupying hospital beds in England who are fit to be discharged.
The funding with buy maximum stays of up to four weeks per patient until the end of March. Integrated care boards will now start booking beds that are most appropriate to patients’ needs.
The Health Secretary will also announce an additional £50 million in capital funding to expand hospital discharge lounges and ambulance hubs. Ambulance queues in some areas are made worse due to a lack of physical space – the money will create new ambulance hubs where vehicles can manoeuvre more easily to avoid delays handing over patients. The funding boost will also expand discharge lounges in NHS Trusts – areas where patients can be moved out of acute beds while they wait to be discharged, freeing up beds in the meantime.
A statement is expected in Parliament later today, which will see Steve Barclay outline a series of further measures to address current pressures facing the NHS over winter. This will include six areas trialling innovative long-term solutions to free up hospital beds and make sure patients get the right care at the right time, which could be rolled out across the NHS if successful. These six ‘National Discharge Frontrunners’ bring innovative, quick solutions which could reduce discharge delays, moving patients from hospital to home more quickly whilst providing continuity of care.
The frontrunners are:
• Sussex Health and Care Integrated Care System: Trialling a new data tool to help services manage performance, give operational oversight and manage demand.
• The Northern Care Alliance: Trialling specialised dementia hubs to support people who have a greater chance of re-admission.
• Humber and North Yorkshire Integrated Care System: Supporting patients to move across health and social care organisations through innovative use of data and real-time intelligence.
• One Croydon Alliance: Trialling a fully integrated team between acute and community, integrated IT system, integrated financial systems and integrated leadership, to better coordination between hospitals and community care settings like rehabilitation services.
• Leeds Health and Care Partnership: Focused on intermediate care, establishing an Active Recovery Service providing short term community rehabilitation and reablement. Focus on rehabilitation and reablement not only improves patient experience but helps prevent future re-admission.
• Warwickshire Place: Trialling a partnership between NHS and Social Care to help provide care and support to patients when they are released from hospital into the community, increasing capacity for home care, and expanding recruitment.
