Will the Minister provide the number of patients discharged from hospital into care homes while awaiting home adaptations in each health board area, for each of the previous five years?
Delayed Transfers of Care data up until February 2020 are available here: Delayed transfers of care (gov.wales)
In common with other regular healthcare data collections, the Delayed Transfers of Care data collection was suspended at the start of the pandemic to ease pressure on NHS resources. We are working to resume collecting data with improvements to support the Discharge to Recover then Assess (D2RA) approach. This is based on better outcomes for individuals who are discharged to their own home or other appropriate care setting for rehabilitation and reablement, prior to assessments for longer-term needs.
In the interim, we have required health boards to submit weekly data returns, recording the number of delayed discharges within their area and the specific reasons, aligned with the D2RA approach. This has provided useful management information to highlight trends and issues and support regions with improvement, but has not been verified for publication.
Our analysis of the most recent all-Wales position shows 425 people were waiting for packages of care on 24 August. This includes 335 people on a D2RA pathway (including community hospitals, other step-down arrangements and people’s own homes) and 90 people were waiting to transfer directly from a hospital to a package of care.
The data is not available to show the number of people waiting for home adaptations by location. Overall, there were 15 people waiting for home adaptations on 24 August throughout Wales.
We are working with the NHS and social care providers to ensure that where there are delays, we can ensure people have appropriate interim care services in place.
The availability of staff to provide domiciliary care services was a challenge prior to the pandemic and we are aware of significant current pressures. The impact of staff self-isolating and of the increases in demand being experienced now, and projected as continuing for some months to come, means there will be substantial challenges in providing care at home over the winter months.
We are taking forward a range of actions to support recruitment into the social care sector, such as Social Care Wales’ WeCare Wales campaign and jobs portal and wider actions to improve recruitment in the medium term. This includes improvements to social care staff terms and conditions and our commitment to deliver the Real Living Wage.