Thursday 8 September 2022 12:50 AM Therese Coffey vows to fix social care issues to ease hospital bed-blocking and ... trends now
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Therese Coffey vowed yesterday to combat the NHS bed-blocking crisis to slash record waiting lists and life-threatening ambulance delays.
The Health Secretary said fixing social care was a priority so that medically fit patients could be discharged promptly from hospital.
This will allow more patients to be admitted for operations and prevent ambulances queuing outside A&E waiting for a bed to become available.
Miss Coffey promised to protect health and social care spending and improve access to dentists and GPs.
The Health Secretary said fixing social care was a priority so that medically fit patients could be discharged promptly from hospital
She ruled out charging patients to see their family doctor and suggested more of the 6.7 million patients on NHS waiting lists will be sent to private hospitals so they can be treated quicker.
Revealing the urgency with which she was approaching her role, she told LBC yesterday: ‘I’m very conscious that we need to make improvements and we need to make them quickly.’
The Daily Mail revealed last month that more than 13,000 hospital beds – one in seven – are occupied by patients with no medical need to be there. These bed-blockers, or ‘delayed discharges’, cost the NHS up to £5.5million a day.
Vulnerable patients face assessment delays and difficulty finding a care home place or someone to help them cook, wash and dress in their own home because of a shortage of carers.
Asked on BBC Radio’s 4 Today programme about Prime Minister Liz Truss’s plan to divert funds from the NHS to social care, Miss Coffey
