NHS pays patients’ energy bills in bid to lower hospital admissions

PATIENTS’ winter energy bills are being paid for by the taxpayer in an attempt to cut hospital admissions.

Anyone on a low income who suffers from health conditions that could be exacerbated by living in a cold house could be eligible as part of a new “warm home prescription scheme”.

The scheme, being piloted in Gloucestershire, Aberdeenshire and Tees Valley, will see GPS and NHS officials contact patients who qualify and invite them to join.

It aims to save the NHS money by taking pre-emptive action to keep people out of hospital and away from doctors by helping them to heat their homes during the winter.

Stuart Brennan, from Energy Systems Catapult, the company running the pilot, told The Daily Telegraph: “The whole point of the scale-up is to determine whether it is more costeffective to keep people out of hospital.

If people are warm at home they are not dying in hospital and it is costing the taxpayer less.”

The initiative was piloted by Gloucestershire NHS last winter, with the local clinical commissioning group funding energy bills of 28 people’s homes.

This year, Gloucestershire has secured funding to roll the scheme out to 150 homes, with a further 1,000 houses in Aberdeenshire and Tees Valley funded by BT’S social impact fund.

In Gloucestershire, people must be diagnosed with chronic lung conditions such as emphysema, chronic bronchitis and bronchiectasis. They also must be either under 60 and in receipt of free NHS prescriptions, or over 60 and struggling to pay their heating bills.

According to Energy Systems Catapult research, living in cold homes costs the NHS more than £860 million a year and causes 10,000 deaths every winter,

The British Medical Association said in England last year there were 63,000 excess winter deaths, with a fifth attributable to cold homes.