Sheffield action plan helping to cut waiting times to send patients home from hospital

A report to Sheffield City Council’s adult health and social care committee (January 31) said that Sheffield continues to discharge 95 per cent of patients back home, with the help of joint council and NHS teams who provide support services when they are needed. These are mainly aimed at older people and anyone who needs social care services.

The meeting heard that the service aims to put the patient and family carers at the centre of the process to plan what services somebody might need in place in order to be safely discharged home. This could be longer-term or temporary.

NHS and council services deal with around 2,500 people a year.

Around one in 10 have been moved on to short-term residential care to be assessed for their care needs.

In answer to a question from Coun Will Sapwell, council assistant director for living and ageing well Kelly Siddons said that the average waiting time for discharge is 10 to 14 days, but this is beginning to drop to five to seven days.

Ambition

“The key thing is early discharge planning,” she said. Coun Sapwell, who is an NHS anaesthetist, said that his impression is that waiting times are dropping.

Alexis Chappell, strategic director of adults’ care and wellbeing, said that the ambition is to cut discharge waiting times to 24 hours.

A specialist team deals with mental health discharges. Janet Kerr, interim deputy director of adult social services and operational delivery, said: “People often wait an awfully long time.” She said that need had often been neglected in the past.

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Coun Ruth Milsom said it was good news that more unpaid carers are getting support via Sheffield Carers Centre, a non-profit support service. She questioned if it has the capacity to keep up with demand.

Ms Kerr told her that she is talking to the centre to see what support it needs. She said: “Our biggest issue with unpaid carers is identifying them and part of it is, even when we identify people – and I put myself in this situation – when I was a carer for my mother, if someone had said to me ‘you’re a carer’ I would have said ‘no, it’s just my mum, it’s not that’.

“So I think it takes an average of two years for people to recognise themselves as an unpaid carer.”

Alien

She said that staff are encouraged to identify unpaid carers, focusing on young carers in particular.

Committee chair Coun Angela Argenzio said: “In some communities, looking after your family is just what you do and people will not see it as caring because it is alien to some communities.”

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She said carers in different communities need to get the message that “accepting help as a carer is not letting people down, it is actually increasing your resilience”.

Coun Sophie Thornton welcomed the report and the news that the backlog has been halved. She asked when it would reach zero.

Ms Kerr replied that it is a very busy time at the hospital and the list is always being added to.

“I think if I ever said we’d get to zero, I’d be fibbing because we’re always going to have new people on – it’s understanding that they’re not the same people all the time but trying not to have people in those beds too long.”