Britain’s social care is at an all-time low

Public dissatisfaction with the UK's social care system has increased significantly. The sector is at an all-time low because it is under unprecedented strain mainly due to underfunding, lack of staff, growing bureaucracy, and an ageing population, including younger adults with disabilities living longer.

On 14 September 2023, the UK government announced £200 million in new funding to boost NHS resilience and ensure patients receive the care they require this winter. It also said it would invest another £40 million to bolster social care capacity and improve hospital patient discharge. 

That news comes one month after the government revealed it would allocate £600 million to retain and hire additional social care staff in England as ministers attempt to strengthen public services ahead of what experts and healthcare officials expect to be one of the NHS's most challenging winters.

But is it enough? 

However, the investment still falls short of the social care budget gap currently affecting the sector, which NHS England recently estimated to be £7 billion. Therefore, the NHS is not sufficiently resilient to look after patients this winter as medical staff nationwide expect an influx of Covid cases, flu, and other respiratory illnesses, Royal College Emergency Medicine President Dr. Adrian Boyle said recently.

"We remain concerned about how we're going to be able to look after our patients this winter," Boyle said after a meeting with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Health Secretary Steve Barclay, health leaders and charities. "We still have far too many patients awaiting admission into hospital."

Delays in hospital discharges

"One of NHS's most significant issues is delays in discharging patients who are well enough to leave hospitals," explained Autumna founder and CEO Debbie Harris, an innovator and leader in the care industry for over a decade.

Harris further explained a late 2022 survey among 40 care homes within a seven-mile radius of a Hospital in the South East. It revealed that 32% of them had never received an inquiry from the discharge team, 63% cited hospital discharge teams provided inferior information, 54% cited difficulties in getting hospital staff to provide more patient details, and they also revealed a lack of trust between hospital staff and care providers.

According to a King's Fund report, the hospital's deficient discharge process means that a daily average of 14% or nearly 14,000 of the 100,000 hospital beds across the UK are occupied by patients who don't need them, a problem that, according to a different report, in three years from 2016 to 2019 has caused 5,500 deaths of people waiting for bed assignments.

"Over 4.4 million bed days are lost each year at an estimated cost of £820 million, impacting the entire journey through a hospital," said Harris, who has created D.A.D., an accelerated discharge and care commissioning solution which helps hospitals speed up patient discharge by automating the process of finding the proper care available to their outpatients within 60 minutes.

Harris said hospital staff faces three main challenges affecting a speedy, effective, and safe hospital discharge: multiple processes needing alignment, the manual process of finding care, and communication between the care provider, discharge team, and the family.

Automating the care-sourcing problem

"D.A.D. addresses two of the main problems by automating the hospitals' manual process of sourcing care by introducing a simple online form that, once filled, all relevant providers receive," Harris added. "The system collates the providers' responses within 60 minutes, generating a shortlist of those who can provide immediate care relevant to the patient."

Harris' game-changing dashboard is powered by Autumna, the UK's largest and most detailed directory of adult social care that supports 2.5 million care seekers a year and lists every registered care provider in the UK, including care homes, home care, live-in care, assisted living, and reablement.

"Thousands of providers and families have tried and tested D.A.D.," said Harris. "In a 'family-facing' version, the online form is currently being used by nearly 3,000 families a month looking for care, 21% of which have a family member awaiting hospital discharge."

"The solution we have created helps end the domino effect caused by delayed discharges by increasing patient flow through hospitals, significantly reducing time spent by discharge teams seeking the right care, and providing access to the entire market instantaneously," added Harris.

While the NHS prepares for what could be the worst winter yet, a solution for a more efficient hospital discharge process that could save the country millions of pounds and thousands of lives is now a reality.

Then, finally, many would soon begin to see its benefits not only for those who require social care but in the UK's entire health care system.

View the original Science Times article by David Thompson published 21st September 2023.