Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 19 May 2020
As of last week, the percentage of delayed discharge patients going to care homes was 38 per cent, so 62 per cent of people who were discharged from hospital went to their own homes with appropriate social care packages. [Jeane Freeman has corrected this contribution. See end of report.]
I refute the idea that we were forcing people out of hospital in order to clear the way for Covid-19 patients. Actually, the 3,000 bed spaces that we cleared came primarily from the key areas of healthcare that we took the very difficult decision to stop—not least, elective procedures.
From time to time, all members will have made the perfectly legitimate point that our delayed discharge figures need to be reduced. What happened in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, as in many other areas of healthcare, is that we managed to attain changes and improvements that we had spent many years trying to achieve. The use of digital tools is one example of that and the incredible expansion of the NHS near me service is another. The focus of our health and social care partnerships was to reduce the number of delayed discharges in order to ensure that individuals had the best possible care and were not in hospital when they no longer needed the clinical care that is provided there.
I do not accept that our response has been dysfunctional. Mr Briggs has quoted selectively from the guidance. We all know that the right clinical decision for elderly and frail individuals is for them not to be in hospital when their clinical care no longer requires that they be there—it is not the best place for them. Some clinicians, including geriatricians, will go so far as to say that hospital is positively a bad place for such individuals to stay in. When clinical care in hospital is no longer required, moving people to their home or into a care home is the right thing to do.
We have said that, while a test can be done—48 hours before discharge from hospital if someone is a Covid patient, or 24 hours if they are not, with 14 days in isolation—testing is not the single silver bullet that will prevent transmission of the virus. Quality infection prevention and control, which should exist in our care homes in any circumstance, is the primary way by which we can prevent transmission.