Councils should be a given a £210m slice from the Winter Resilience Fund to help reduce bedblocking in hospitals, argues the Local Government Association (LGA).
The LGA said new analysis reveals 145,067 hospital beds have been 'blocked' over the past 12 months, an increase of 7,454 days from the previous year.
The figures show that 30% of all cases are a direct result of not having enough social care provision to enable someone to be discharged from hospital. The LGA says that despite these figures, less than 6% of available funding is used to ease pressure on social care.
It urges the Government to urgently release more money to local areas to prevent a ‘crisis’ this winter.
Cllr Izzi Seccombe, the LGA’s community wellbeing spokesman, said: ‘We need to see a change to the current perverse funding system which, over the last five years, has seen an increase in funding for the NHS but a decrease in funding for social care. This threatens to leave councils struggling to commission the essential support which keeps people out of hospital and living healthier and happier lives in their communities.
‘Whilst we are working with the NHS to prepare for the coming months we still urgently need proper funding from the Government to make sure that local areas can deal with winter pressures – or we risk leaving our most vulnerable to suffer unnecessarily in hospital in the coming months.’
