Push to ease bed blocking in hospitals
THOUSANDS more patients will be discharged into hotels, care homes and ‘virtual wards’ to ease pressure on hospitals, the Health Secretary will announce today.
Steve Barclay is set to unveil a further £200 million to fund shortterm care placements in the community to ease the bed-blocking crisis engulfing the NHS.
Some of the strain comes from around 13,000 people occupying hospital beds in England, despite being medically fit to leave, as they need further care before going home.
It is estimated that around 3,000 patients will be moved to other facilities in the coming weeks, with funds for stays of up to four weeks per person. This will free up hospital beds for those in greater clinical need.
Ministers hope this will unclog the system by reducing A&E waits with quicker hospital admissions on to wards, reducing pressure on emergency departments and speeding up ambulance handovers.
In a statement in Parliament, Mr Barclay is expected to announce a series of projects to tackle delayed discharges, which is costing the NHS an estimated £5.5million a day.
He will acknowledge the ‘extreme challenge’ the NHS is facing this winter, with the worst flu season for a decade and strikes adding to the backlog from Covid.
Mr Barclay will say he is taking ‘urgent action’, including ‘investing an additional £200million to enable the NHS to immediately buy up beds in the community to safely discharge thousands of patients’.
This will be on top of £500million already invested in tackling the problem, he will add.
The Health Secretary is set to also say: ‘In addition, we are trialling six National Discharge Frontrunners – innovative, quick solutions which could reduce discharge delays, moving patients from hospital to home more quickly.’
Pilot schemes, including dementia hubs run by The Northern Care Alliance in Greater Manchester and community rehab by Leeds Health and Care Partnership, will be rolled out nationally if successful.
A further £50million will be set aside for discharge lounges and ambulance hubs to move patients from hospital to home more quickly.
Ambulance queues in some areas are made worse due to a lack of physical space. The new money will create 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 leave, freeing up beds in the meantime.
It comes after the Prime Minister signalled he wanted greater use of ‘virtual wards’ to help what he called ‘the number one problem’ of 13,000 people in hospital who do not need to be there.
Using equipment such as blood pressure monitors and pulse oximeters to log blood oxygen levels, patients upload readings via an app on a smartphone or computer to an online ‘hub’, managed by clinicians.
As part of plans to create the equivalent of 7,000 more beds, the NHS aims to have 40-50 virtual ward beds per 100,000 population by the end of the year.
On BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme, Rishi Sunak said his Government was keen to encourage ‘best practice’ in the NHS, including more virtual wards.
But Dennis Reed, director of Silver Voices, which campaigns for elderly Britons, said he was ‘ very worried’ that vulnerable patients could be discharged too soon.
He described virtual wards as ‘experimental’ and said they should not be relied upon as the ‘panacea to ease so-called bed-blocking’.
Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, welcomed the additional funding but warned that it was ‘no silver bullet’.
He said discharging patients could have ‘ unintended consequences elsewhere’, heaping additional pressure on already- stretched primary care services.
Labour health spokesman Wes Streeting called the measures ‘ yet another sticking plaster’ for ‘ buckling health and care services’.
‘Moving patients more quickly’