Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps he is taking to reduce the number of bed days lost owing to delayed transfers of care in NHS trusts; and if he will make a statement.

There has been an increase in delayed transfers of care over the past two years. This has resulted in pressure on the availability of hospital beds. The proportion of occupied bed capacity attributable to social care delays is estimated at 1.8% between April 2016 and November 2016, which is an increase of 0.8 percentage points over the same period in 2014-15. However, there is also a 20-fold difference in social care delays between the 10% best performing and 10% worst performing local authorities but not a 20-fold difference in funding.

The Department, NHS England, NHS Improvement and local government are working together to provide a wide-ranging package of support to help local areas improve transfers out of hospital and reduce delays. This includes the implementation of best practice interventions such as:

- home first or discharge to assess models of care - so patients are discharged quickly and safely to home or to step down care so they no longer need wait unnecessarily for assessments in hospital; and

- trusted assessor models - using trusted assessors to carry out a holistic assessment of need avoids duplication and speeds up response times so that people can be discharged in a safe and timely way.