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- Member
Tue Oct 10, 2017 3:23 pm
An interesting article from the later edition of today's Guardian :
https://www.theguardian.com/social-care ... ital-wards
A snippet follows .... full article with a couple of case studies worth reading :
At first glance , a well worthwhile scheme .... as run by the NHS , I presume free ???
Colour coding to follow ... quicker to discharge a patient than fill up an INK bottle ???
https://www.theguardian.com/social-care ... ital-wards
'Home first' model aims to stop patients being stranded on hospital wards.
The quicker older people get out of hospital, the less likely they’ll end up in residential homes or back on a ward.
A snippet follows .... full article with a couple of case studies worth reading :
With winter looming, health and care teams are being urged to radically overhaul discharge procedures to prevent patients being left stranded on hospital wards. New approaches are yielding striking results that could help avert a beds crisis – and improve older people’s chances of continuing to live independently.
The latest thinking on hospital discharge is to get people home and then carry out assessment of their support needs and rehabilitation. Hospital trusts and their community health and social care partners are being encouraged to adopt a “discharge-to-assess” (D2A) or “home-first” model.
Where the models have been tested, the number of patients subject to delayed discharge has plummeted; the number of patients going into residential care has also shrunk dramatically – in one instance, almost to nothing.
“We can see that the impact of D2A is huge,” says Liz Sargeant, clinical lead for the national emergency care improvement programme. “Ten days in bed for patients over 80 is equivalent to 10 years’ ageing of muscles.”
Hospital to home: people's needs must be central to transfers of care
This deconditioning means that some people go into hospital never to see their own home again. “Yet people can instead be discharged, then supported in their own homes,” says Sargeant.
Images of people waiting for trolleys in A&E and reports of routine operations being cancelled dominate the news every winter, as demand for hospital beds spikes. Nearly two thirds of hospital inpatients at any one time are 65 or older, according to the National Audit Office, while delays in discharge, or “transfers of care”, are almost a third up on 2014. That’s equivalent to almost 6,000 beds a day being taken up unnecessarily, with 55% of delays attributed to the NHS – principally “patients awaiting further non-acute NHS care” – and 37% attributed to social care, principally patients awaiting a care package for when they return home.
Measures announced in July aimed at prompting councils to cut delays on the social care side have proved controversial. Critics have questioned the rationale of threatening to cut funding for councils that fail to respond. But part of the drive to free up as many as 3,000 extra beds is based on an expectation by NHS Improvement (NHSI), the agency that works with care providers, that hospitals will adopt the D2A model as good practice and have just one person carry out needs assessments.
At first glance , a well worthwhile scheme .... as run by the NHS , I presume free ???
Colour coding to follow ... quicker to discharge a patient than fill up an INK bottle ???
