Call for more home carers to aid OAPS
ANOTHER health board is recruiting domiciliary carers to help elderly patients get home from hospital faster.
Swansea Bay University Health Board is jointly recruiting with its constituent councils – and the new roles will attract 10% higher salaries than normal, according to health board chief executive Mark Hackett.
The aim is to reduce the considerable pressure being felt by hospitals.
Councils are responsible for domiciliary care, but successful applicants for the new roles will be offered the choice of health board or council terms and conditions.
Last week Hywel Dda University Health Board also agreed to recruit domiciliary carers in order to expand a bridging service it provides to help get patients home.
Mr Hackett said the new roles would be “hugely rewarding” and “offer a fantastic work experience”.
The minimum number of new recruits is 30.
Mr Hackett said the health board, which covers Swansea and Neath Port Talbot, was also securing more care home beds for hospital patients who were medically fit for discharge.
In August the health board had on average 233 patients who were well enough to leave hospital but were still occupying a bed because they didn’t have a package of care. It was the highest number for two years.
Meanwhile, waiting times for appointments, diagnostics and procedures are currently at their highest.
Mr Hackett said the widespread pressures were causing “considerably raised safety concerns in all aspects of our care”.
He added: “We are making active choices about service levels at the moment.”
It was, he said, a “very worrying time”.
Mr Hackett said the public might wonder what the problem was, given the high Covid vaccination rates.
He explained that a lot of health and social care staff were having to isolate as Covid transmission rates were high in the community.
Although coronavirus hospital admissions were currently much lower than in previous waves, patients with Covid were still having to be kept separate from non-covid patients, which created its own pressures.
Mr Hackett added that the “very competitive labour market” was adversely affecting the recruitment of health and social care staff, and that demands on the health service more generally were rising.
And he said the tiredness felt by staff, given the last 18 months, was impacting on their ability to adapt to these challenges - this despite their excellent work.
His report before board members said: “It is a day-to-day struggle to provide safe care when people need it.”
Other measures to address the pressures include speeding up arrangements for the creation of “same day emergency care” at Morriston Hospital, plus opening up capacity for more short-stay medical admission care. These actions, said Mr Hackett, could free up 40 to 80 beds. He also said extra occupational therapist and physiotherapist cover at weekends was now resulting in more patient discharges than would otherwise be the case.
And more theatre sessions are being offered this month.
Mr Hackett’s report said additional Government funding would pay for delayed orthopaedic, ophthalmology, maxillofacial and dermatology operations.
Planning in the background to
make Morriston, Singleton and Neath Port Talbot hospitals individual centres of excellence – with the aim of creating a more closely integrated NHS service – continues.
A consultation on the proposal, called Changing for the Future, ended on October 1 and elicited more than 1,200 responses.
A decision will be made at the end of this month about progressing the centres of excellence proposal.