NHS concerned about winter pressures

A new report by NHS Providers has revealed that NHS trusts in England are deeply concerned about their ability to respond to mounting pressures next winter.

The report, Winter Warning, highlights the worries of many NHS trusts that extra funding for social care, partly allocated to ease winter pressure on the health service, is not consistently getting through to the NHS.

Despite the extraordinary efforts from staff last winter, the health and care systems struggled to cope under sustained pressure, with delayed transfers of care causing extra difficulties and the inability to line up suitable social care creating heavy bed blocking.

NHS Providers argue that the government’s £1 billion of extra social care funding is not easing pressure and that only 28 per cent of trusts have had a specific commitment that the funding would help reduce delayed transfers of care.

Furthermore, 34 per cent of responders to the report said their local authorities were giving a high priority to supporting the NHS reduce delayed transfers of care as opposed to other social care needs, while 44 per cent thought the money would have no impact on their ability to manage winter pressures.

Therefore, the report calls for a funding injection of £350 million, committed by the end of July at the latest to: put in place extra beds in community and mental health services as well as in hospitals; help pay for more doctors, nurses and care home staff; enable the ambulance service to take more of the patient load; and strengthen mental health crisis care to prevent hospital admissions.

Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, said: “Last winter NHS staff responded heroically to extraordinary pressures. But safety and standards of care were compromised. In too many places the NHS was overwhelmed for short periods of time. We must not allow that to happen again. What is clear from our survey and detailed conversations with frontline trusts is that the government’s plan of trying to gain a double benefit from the Budget’s extra £1 billion social care funding is not going to work consistently enough. Trusts say the NHS has about a month to plug the gap.

“One of the key findings in our survey was that trusts need to know about any extra capacity by the end of July so they can plan properly and secure the extra staff cost effectively. Last winter gave us the clearest possible warning that patient safety is now at risk. We have one more month to respond to those warnings.”