Winter plan to free up hospital beds is drawn up

The city council’s Winter Plan Summary 2022-23 also looks at ways of enabling more people to be discharged from hospital in order to receive support at home or in a care environment.

A meeting of the council’s fulfilled adult lives scrutiny panel on Tuesday heard an outline of the schemes in place to implement the necessary levels of care for adults in the coming months.

Director of adult social services Becky Wilkinson told members: “The NHS winter period runs from October through to March, so that’s the time period we are referring to. This is the last meeting we have before January, so I just wanted to bring some assurance around how we’re rapidly working as a system to get the plan in place.

“Every winter, the health department look at what they call their ‘beds deficit’ to see how many beds they think they are going to need to free up for the winter period, and in Wolverhampton at the moment we are looking at around 52 beds.

“We have worked with our colleagues in health to look at ambulance delays, admission avoidance and what we can do to support GP practices. In terms of funding for this plan there is an urgent and emergency care budget which is around £1 million, along with our allocation from the government’s £500 million adult social care discharge fund. The amount is not yet known,” she added.

“For the last ten days the hospital has been at level four pressures, which is the level of pressure we’d expect at the height of winter. That has dropped this week and I am pleased to say that we are down at level three, but we are already really seeing pressures in terms of keeping the flow going in hospital.

“In terms of what we are doing regarding social care, we’re looking at how we can support discharge from hospital. This is an annual narrative and I would really like to change some of that from next year so we start to look at hospital admission avoidance, because once we’re looking at discharge that person has already been admitted.

“We have a ‘HomeFirst’ policy in place that was introduced during Covid, and between ourselves as a local authority and our health partners we will continue to fund this in order to support people at home during winter.

“We’ve also been looking at our telecare responder service with St John Ambulance if people are falling and how we can get out to help them, rather than West Midlands Ambulance coming to convey them to hospital,” said Ms Wilkinson.

“We are also working with health partners on ‘virtual wards’, where essentially we are supporting people to stay if they are in nursing or residential homes and how we can keep them there. The support they are going to get in a nursing home is very similar to what they would get in hospital if we can get the right level of GP support in place.

“We’re looking at things like ‘carer in the car’ to support people leaving hospital – it may be just that they need someone to turn the heating on; to make sure it’s not cold, it’s not dark and that they’ve got food. Not having some of those things can prevent discharge.

“We will be using our funding to get people out of hospital during the winter and looking into any other support we can get from British Red Cross and Age UK. Winter’s going to be tricky but we are as lined up as we possibly can be,” she added.

Councillor Rashpal Kaur (Lab. Bilston East) said: “As the pressures on the system grow, the funding needs to grow also. The grants are little pockets of funding here and there which is not sustainable long-term. It’s like a shopping list and is unfair and unequal. It’s highlighting the inequalities in our wards and in our city.”

The panel agreed to review the plan again in January.