Care beds lie empty due to Government stand-off over price

HOSPITALS are unable to discharge patients to care homes to free up beds because the Government and private providers are stuck in a stand-off over a multimillion-pound contract, The Daily Telegraph can reveal.

Front-line healthcare workers are warning of “the impending tsunami” of coronavirus patients who will need critical care in the coming weeks, and of the “huge urgency” in increasing hospital capacity before the UK reaches the peak of the pandemic.

However, it has emerged that some care home beds are lying empty and that hospitals cannot discharge elderly patients because they have yet to agree a fee with the private sector.

Prof Martin Green, head of Care England, the largest representative body for independent providers in adult social care, told The Telegraph that “endless negotiations” were resulting in bed blocking at a critical time.

Care England, which has 185,000 beds in its membership, is currently trying to negotiate a “flat rate” contract with the Department of Health that would cost between £1,300 and £1,700 per person per week in what would be a multimillion-pound deal.

Asked whether care homes would see an increase or a freeze in fees and what the plan was, Prof Green said: “Yes, I have a plan, which is that I want NHS England to come up with an agreed approach and an agreed fee, which would be about really speeding up the people going out of hospital.

“They’ve steadfastly not done that up until now. Endless negotiations are going on with people around fees… We’ve got to get these processes really slick and I’d like a central position on it, and also on how it is paid.”

Prof Green added: “That’s what our proposal was, a flat rate. So that we could then get people out of hospitals, and that flat rate would then be the rate people would transfer from hospital to a care setting for that period when they were needing to be supported, because, of course, they couldn’t be in hospital.”

He said that the figure being asked for was “probably between what local authorities miserably pay”, about £500 per week, and what some self-funders pay, which equates to about £2,000 per week.

“It’s probably, £1,300 to £1,700 per person a week, which is, of course, a lot cheaper than being in a hospital bed. That’s what I was hoping that they could try and agree.”

His comments came after harrowing reports from Spain that soldiers were deployed to care homes and tasked with disinfecting them, only to find abandoned corpses.

However, some care providers are already taking cases – despite not having guarantees of payment or future provision of protection gear.

Dr Sharon Raymond, a GP working in unscheduled care including the 111

‘It’s imperative that patients not needing hospital care are diverted away into appropriate care settings’

service, said: “There’s an impending tsunami in terms of patients needing hospital care – it’s imperative that those patients not needing hospital care are diverted away into appropriate care settings as a matter of urgency.

“We need to reduce pressures on hospitals to make sure the most sick patients get the care they need.”

A British Medical Association spokesman added: “We cannot comment on the specific negotiations.

“An increasing numbers of patients will need to be cared for in the community. This requires both increasing the number of care home beds and freeing up capacity in hospitals wherever possible, so that patients who no longer need to be in hospital can be discharged quickly and safely.”

The Department for Health declined to comment on the ongoing negotiations with the independent sector or Care England specifically.