Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 1
1
Accepted
Evidence taken from DHSC and NHS England on access to unplanned or urgent care.
Conclusion
On the basis of a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, we took evidence from the Department of Health & Social Care (the Department) and NHS England about access to unplanned or urgent care.1
Government Response Summary
The government agrees and outlines a comprehensive plan to improve patient flow and urgent care, including boosting bed capacity, implementing digital tools, increasing paramedic numbers, and introducing care transfer hubs and discharge funding through the Urgent and Emergency Care recovery plan.
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. improving patient flow through hospitals, with plans to boost capacity with 5,000 extra core General and Acute beds. In addition to this, NHS England is working with systems to support implementation of digital tools that support decision making in near real time, including the development of System Control Centres (SCCs) and the use of electronic bed-management systems both in hospitals and across other health and care settings. NHS England will also continue to develop and roll out the A&E Admissions Forecasting Tool. NHS England is supporting trusts with delivery plans to ensure solutions are in place to benefit all organisations. Within the recovery plan, NHS England has worked with systems to agree plans on bed capacity, Virtual Ward capacity (already reaching the 10,000-bed capacity ambition), Same Day Emergency Care standardisation as well as specific growth in paramedic numbers. NHS England will provide a full response and elaborate on the understanding of the factors impacting productivity and its plans to address these in its letter to the Committee. billion over 2023-24 and 2024-25, on top of the extra £500 million invested in 2022-23, to enable the NHS and local authorities to commission a greater range of services for people who need short- term packages of care and support for rehabilitation, reablement and recovery and to prevent avoidable delays to hospital discharge. 4.3 The Urgent and Emergency Care recovery plan, published in January 2023, sets out a wide programme of measures to tackle delayed discharges from hospital and community settings and improve outcomes for patients. In addition to increased discharge funding, this includes action to improve discharge processes; introduce care transfer hubs in all areas of the country to streamline and improve management of discharges for patients with more complex health and/or social care needs; improve models of rehabilitation and reablement; increase adult social care capacity; provide a more integrated approach to supporting improvements in discharge across health and social care; and improve the use of data and metrics to drive improvements in discharge.