£500m war chest to tackle NHS bed-blocking plight

TheReSe Coffey has vowed to combat the NhS bed-blocking crisis with the launch of a £ 500million emergency fund.

The health and Social Care Secretary told MPs the money will help free-up space in hospitals as she revealed her own nine-hour wait in A&e.

Beleaguered ambulance services will also be supported by a new army of volunteer first aiders in a bid to cut delays. More than 13,000 beds in england – around one in seven – are occupied by patients who have been deemed medically fit to leave.

But a shortage of carers means they face difficulty finding a place in care or home help. Care providers will be encouraged to use the fund to help plug 165,000 vacancies.

Staff may be offered bonuses, pay rises or more generous overtime to prevent more leaving for better paid jobs in retail. There will also be a drive to attract more care workers from abroad, with £15million available to cover areas like visa applications and accommodation.

Miss Coffey described the £500million as a ‘downpayment’ while ministers work to rebalance funding across health and social care.

But care charities last night dismissed the sum as ‘insulting’. Delayed discharges cost the NhS up to £5.5million a day, while a record 6.8 million languish on waiting lists.

The fund is among a host of measures in the Government’s Our Patient Plan, which was published yesterday in a drive to avert an NhS meltdown this winter. The health Secretary revealed she was motivated to tackle poor care after suffering her own A&e ordeal in July, when she waited nearly nine hours to see a doctor and still wasn’t treated. She said: ‘I was asked to go back the next day, so I went to a different hospital just three miles away and I was seen and treated appropriately.

‘That’s the sort of variation that we’re seeing across the NhS.’ But Mike Padgham, chairman of the Independent Care Group, said the cash ‘will not touch the sides’.

he said: ‘Announcing this £500million as if it were the answer to our prayers is insulting. This is a sticking plaster put on a gaping wound by a doctor that doesn’t see how sick the patient is.’

Miss Coffey, pictured, also vowed a ‘laser-like focus’ on ambulance handover delays and revealed 45 per cent occur at just 15 NhS hospital trusts, which will be given ‘intensive’ support to improve.

hospitals will open the equivalent of 7,000 more beds, and use ‘remote monitoring’ in people’s own homes, while the number of 999 and NhS 111 call handlers will rise.

The Government will also be ‘exploring the creation of an ambulance auxiliary service’.

Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting criticised Miss Coffey’s ‘ Sesame Street’ plan, which she has called ‘A, B, C, D’ – ‘ambulances, backlogs, care and doctors and dentists’. And Conservative former health secretary Jeremy hunt said: ‘It is not more targets the NhS needs, it is more doctors’.

‘A plaster on a gaping wound’