The Government is making available £200m to help secure local care home spaces so that patients can be safely discharged from overcrowded hospitals.
The funding, which will be announced today by health and social care secretary Steve Barclay, will pay for short-term care placements and will fund maximum stays of up to four weeks per patient until the end of March.
The move will free up hospital beds so that people can be admitted more quickly from A&E to wards.
Mr Barclay said: ‘The NHS is under enormous pressure from COVID and flu, and on top of tackling the backlog caused by the pandemic, Strep A and upcoming strikes, this winter poses an extreme challenge.
‘I am taking urgent action to reduce pressure on the health service, including investing an additional £200m to enable the NHS to immediately buy up beds in the community to safely discharge thousands of patients from hospital and free up hospital capacity, on top of the £500m we’ve already invested to tackle this issue.’
The Government is also set to announce an additional £50m in capital funding to expand hospital discharge lounges and ambulance hubs.
Cllr David Fothergill, chairman of the Local Government Association (LGA) Community Wellbeing Board, said: 'This piecemeal allocation of funding is no substitute for a strategic approach to the pressure on hospital beds which requires a much broader range of actions to prevent admission, streamline discharge for those that do not need social care and focus on capacity to support recovery.
'It is disappointing that so much of the current narrative on social care implies it exists solely to ease pressure on the NHS and is failing to do its job. Many people rely on social care to support them to live independent and fulfilling lives and the continual focus on supporting the NHS, important though it is, places these vital services at risk. Until the Government presents social care as an essential service in its own right – valued equally highly as the NHS – we will continue to lurch from one sticking plaster to the next.'
