Health chiefs ditch spare-room care plan after just 1 day
Put a patient in your spare room to ease bedblocking ... and earn £1k a month
HEALTH bosses have backtracked on plans to pay families £50 a night to put up patients after only a day.
The radical scheme – due to go ahead in Essex – had been designed to free up hospital beds and allow patients to recuperate in friendly environments.
But campaigners raised safety fears over the proposal.
Families would be paid to let out their spare room for five nights at a time and heat up three microwave meals, delivered to the door.
They would not need any previous experience in caring, but would have to provide a welcoming environment and friendly conversation.
Labour’s care spokesman Barbara Keeley likened the scheme to Airbnb, the website that allows people to let out homes to holidaymakers, dubbing the plans ‘Carebnb’ and warning of ‘clear safety risks’.
The scheme – designed to tackle the NHS’s bedblocking crisis – was to be overseen by private firm CareRooms and funded by public money, with the bill footed by local councils and NHS trusts.
Yesterday, the hospital which was meant to be recruiting the first families and patients to take part has claimed it had no intention of supporting the trial ‘at this time’.
Southend University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust – which had been handing out flyers – said that it would need to carry out a ‘full discussion and engagement’ process beforehand. NHS England also distanced itself from the scheme even though it had trained up the founder – an A&E doctor – as part of an entrepreneurial programme.
A spokesman said: ‘While it’s good to hear innovative ideas from NHS staff, this suggestion is a long way from being implemented and would first need to be very carefully assessed and tested.’
Dr Harry Thirkettle, co-founder of the firm, said: ‘What we’re aiming towards is patients who just need short-term accommodating either before going home or going into long-term care. You can imagine someone who had a leg fracture and is unable to go up and down their stairs, so until that fracture is healed they could come to us and stay in a ground floor accommodation.
‘There is good evidence out there about the effects of long-term hospitalisation on people – they lose muscle strength and mass, it impairs their cognition.
‘We hope that by allowing people to be discharged to a home-like environment, quicker, that would give massive benefits for patients.’ Tom Utley and Comment – Page 16
ONCE in a while, someone comes up with an idea so dazzlingly obvious, simple and sensible that the only wonder is why nobody thought of it before. Such is the partial solution to the NHS bed-blocking crisis, devised by a start-up company in Essex and revealed this week in the Health Service Journal.
The problem can be stated simply enough. Every day and night, a record 5,800 NHS beds are occupied by patients who are well enough to be discharged after undergoing such operations as hip or knee replacements.
That is to say, they would be well enough if only they had someone at home to cook for them and see to their basic needs until they were mobile enough to look after themselves.
As it is, they tend to live alone, while the authorities encounter endless difficulties in arranging home visits or residential placements for them under the overstretched social care system. Brainwave
So there these unfortunates lie in hospital, through no wish or fault of their own, occupying beds urgently needed for others. The average cost to the NHS is officially reckoned at some £400 each per day — which by my maths puts the annual bill for bed-blocking at £846,800,000.
This is where the start-up company’s brainwave comes in. The people behind CareRooms rightly realised that all over the country there are homeowners with spare rooms and the time and inclination to help others. Typically, these will be middle-aged couples whose children have fled the nest, or widows who would welcome a bit of company and a little extra cash to eke out their pensions.
So what could be more pleasing all round than tapping into this fund of goodwill by hooking up the bed-blockers with people willing and able to accommodate them in return for a modest fee?
As CareRooms co-founder Dr Harry Thirkettle points out, there is strong evidence that the longer patients stay in hospital, the more likely they are to suffer cognitive impairment and loss of muscle strength and mass. In domestic surroundings they tend to recover more quickly. So patients would benefit.
Hosts would be gainers, too. Not only would those who are lonely or bored have company and something useful to do with their time, under the scheme as proposed, they would be paid £50 a night, up to a maximum of £1,000 a month, while being expected to offer little more than ‘a warm smile, a comfortable, clean room and some microwave meals’.
Another £50 would go to CareRooms, in return for which it would vet hosts, arrange placements and carry out any work needed to adapt homes, such as fitting handrails. Meanwhile, qualified carers would monitor patients by telephone and online.
As for the NHS, its total bill of £100 a night would be only a quarter of the cost of a blocked bed — while, of course, those on the waiting list for operations would receive treatment more quickly.
Nobody pretends the scheme offers a complete solution to the problems in the health service, let alone the social care crisis. But with patients, hosts, the enterprising Essex company itself and the NHS all standing to benefit — and no one to lose — what’s not to love about it? At the very least it must surely be worth a try. Indeed, who could possibly object?
Yesterday, we learnt the infinitely depressing answer to that question. For barely was the ink dry on reports of the scheme than the massed ranks of the public sector, the Labour Party and the quangocracy raised howls of disapproval.
For Labour, Shadow Social Care minister Barbara Keeley fulminated: ‘It’s astonishing that the Tories’ care crisis is now so bad the NHS and councils are looking to private homeowners to provide rooms.
‘These services cannot be provided on such a casual basis and there are clear risks to the people who accept this cut-price care.’
Helen Jones, of the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services, was similarly dismissive.
Sneer
‘The model of care, as described, raises questions about whether the safety and well-being of the individual have been fully considered,’ she told the Health Service Journal. ‘Rigorous safeguarding and governance processes should never be compromised.’
Meanwhile, reports that Southend Hospital was interested in piloting the scheme horrified activists campaigning to save the local A&E department.
‘We are shocked that an NHS trust is endorsing such a company,’ said a spokesman. ‘Offering beds in private residential homes opens a huge can of worms for safeguarding, governance and possible financial and emotional abuse.’
What’s wrong with these people? They sneer that the scheme would mean ‘social care on the cheap’, administered on unregulated premises by amateurs without specialist qualifications. But what on earth gives them the impression that expensive care is a good thing in itself, and necessarily better than a cheaper variety? And what qualifications does anyone need, apart from a kind heart, for looking after a convalescent patient pronounced medically fit to be discharged from hospital?
Perhaps I’m missing something, but presumably even the Labour Party would be content to send such patients home to the care of a wholly unqualified family member, if there happened to be one on the premises.
Speaking of which, my wife and I have no professional care qualifications whatsoever. Yet somehow we have managed (all right, mostly my wife) to nurse four boys through various childhood illnesses to healthy adulthood.
Meanwhile, much as they may moan about their parents, I’m prepared to bet our sons enjoyed a far happier childhood than if they had been brought up in a rigorously state-regulated care home by professionals festooned with certificates.
But no, in the teeth of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the Left clings to its belief that only the public sector can deliver decent care ( and the more regulations, the merrier), while anything that smacks of private enterprise, charity or the goodness of individuals must necessarily be evil.
Outrage
Witness Labour’s obsessive attacks on the spread of food banks — to my mind, a noble and practical example of the spirit of human charity in action.
It’s as if Jeremy Corbyn and Co believe that a tin of tomato soup bought with the taxes of someone on the minimum wage tastes better than the identical tin tossed into the collection basket outside Sainsbury’s by a member of the comfortably off middle classes like me.
The tragedy is that the statists always seem to win. Indeed, less than 24 hours after reports of the CareRooms brainwave appeared, the scheme already seems doomed. Faced with the barrage of manufactured outrage, Southend Hospital yesterday backpedalled frantically, announcing that it had ‘no intention to support the pilot at this time’.
Mind you, even if some other NHS trust plucks up the courage to try the scheme, you can be sure the mighty quangocracy will find ways of wrecking it.
Before you know it, the kind-hearted widow with the spare room will find her home swarming with council inspectors insisting she must install fire doors, stairlifts and transsexual toilet facilities. Then they’ll send her off to complete courses in health and safety, first aid, anti-racism, gender fluidity awareness and Muslim dietary requirements.
After a few weeks of this, the company’s scheme will become just as expensive and unattractive as publicly funded social care — and the chance of spreading a little human happiness will be lost. But then, who cares? The State certainly doesn’t.