Helping support people being discharged from hospital

We know how hard it can be for anyone who has been in hospital for a long period of time.

Whether you are recovering after surgery, have suffered from a long illness, or even if you have had a fall at home, you won’t be discharged from hospital unless your medical team is reassured you have the equipment and support you need at home to facilitate safe independent living.

Anyone who watched The Hospital programme on BBC One in 2018, which came from Nottingham’s Queen’s Medical Centre, could see the pressure hospitals are under due to struggles with getting people discharged from hospital at the right time.

There are many people still taking up hospital beds, who don’t need to be there for medical reasons, but haven’t got the appropriate care package at home to enable them to live safely and independently.

These pressures are only exacerbated in Winter, as the chance of illness increases, and the risk of slips, trips and falls in older and less mobile people heightens.

In the Winter of 2018-19 the Nottingham on Call team was granted some funding from Nottingham City Council to deliver a Winter Pressures project. This enabled us to offer people who weren’t funded by social care packages, the support of Nottingham on Call, its equipment and services, for six months once they were discharged from hospital.

This not only helped the NHS to get people discharged from hospital, but it helped the patients themselves to get home and be surrounded by their own things, their family and friends, and enabled them to get back to their normal day-to-day life.

These people may otherwise have been still stuck in hospital. Without the reassurance of the personal care alarm and monitoring service, specialist mobility aids and other specialist equipment, highlighted by our Occupational Therapy team, medical teams could not be confident in a hospital discharge.

Once those customers get to the end of their six months package, we will speak to them about possibly extending their support for as little as £6.29 (plus VAT) per week, or it may be the case that by this point, their health has improved and they no longer needed our support.

We hope that our support during that Winter period, will have made the difference to the people we have worked with across the city, and to the local NHS teams looking to get people discharged from hospital.