Hospital Beds: Availability

Baroness Wheeler Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

My noble friend is quite right that there has been an increasing prevalence of domiciliary care, which involves carers caring for patients in their own homes. Making sure that those patients can get home at a good time that works for them and those who support them is clearly a critical part of dealing with this delayed discharge issue.

[Baroness Wheeler (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister was talking about care workers rather than carers. He has focused on social care but Nuffield Trust research shows that the proportion of discharge delays due to the unavailability of social care has grown by 84% in six years, but also that 57% of delays occurred because of problems in the NHS itself. This is because of a lack of local NHS community or rehabilitation services, and of the availability of home support therapies or access to diagnostic and other services. Are STPs going to be able to tackle this, given the scale of cuts that will need to be made? Is the Minister confident that last year’s NAO report, which warned that the Department of Health and NHS England rely “too easily” on differing local circumstances as a “catch-all excuse” for not improving NHS performance, is being addressed?

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

The noble Baroness is quite right that there is increasing pressure on the health service. There have been 3.5 million more hospital admissions in the last 10 years and 2.4 million more A&E attendances in the last five years, so there is huge extra pressure. The number of acute beds has been dropping for a long time but at a slower rate in more recent years. Clearly, making sure that the right level of community care is available—step-down or interim care between hospital and home—will be incredibly important, particularly with a growing and ageing population.