Care Homes: Staffing

Baroness Browning Excerpts

Wednesday 11th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Markham (Con)]

Since the question yesterday, I have had a chance to talk to colleagues further about domiciliary care and understand its vital role. I talked to one ICB today, which has its own arm’s-length body, set up by the local authority, which does exactly what was suggested by employing domiciliary care staff full-time. They know the patient best and are ready to take them back out of hospital and put them in place. This is central to what we are doing.

[Baroness Browning (Con)]

When people are transferred, either to home or residential care places, part of the delay is caused by the need, quite rightly, for a proper and appropriate assessment of their needs before a transfer is made. What work have the Government done to assess who is going to carry out those proper assessments, either at the hospital or the care home end, and what the likely delay at that stage will be? It is delaying a lot of people now and no doubt will continue to do so.

[Lord Markham (Con)]

That is absolutely right. In our weekly meetings as Ministers, we look at the reason for the delays in terms of the 13,000 beds. That assessment of delay is one of the key criteria that we monitor each week. The best ICBs that I have seen have teams on this—they are absolutely SWAT teams—who make sure that they do it, and measure the time in which they can do it; for example, they have got to have that assessment within 24 hours. When the patient goes in, they have an estimate of the day that they are leaving, which they will target and work towards. The best do that, and the task force is set up to make sure that it is rolled out to all the other places.