A councillor says hard work has taken place to ensure the number of people in hospital waiting for social care across Staffordshire remains low.
Cllr Julia Jessel, cabinet member for health and care at Staffordshire County Council, made her comments in a report to a meeting next week.
In her health and care winter update, the councillor said additional services had been commissioned to “facilitate timely hospital discharges”.
She added:
“The NHS nationally has been under extraordinary pressure this winter.
“There have been high levels of demand due to large numbers of people unwell with respiratory virus infections, compounded by staff shortages due to vacancies and sickness absence.
“Urgent care activity has been particularly high with large numbers of emergency hospital admissions and widespread reports of ambulances queueing outside emergency departments.
“There remains a substantial opportunity to reduce emergency hospital admissions by improving management of elderly and frail people in the community, especially at end of life.
“It is also important to ensure timely hospital discharges – Staffordshire has fully integrated hospital discharge services. This means that very few Staffordshire residents now wait in acute hospitals for social care.”
Cllr Julia Jessel, Staffordshire County Council
Cllr Jessel added that the council was working to develop additional extra care and nursing home capacity, as well as supporting efforts to recruit and retain staff.
The report will be heard at a meeting of Staffordshire County Council’s cabinet on Wednesday (18th January).
I have had a private community care business since 1993 . The promise of putting more money into community based care was made then but never appeared. As one of the original companies we always paid staff fairly and paid travelling time, I note over the last few months there are lots of new companies starting up mainly because they think they will make a large profit with the government splashing money about .If the companies offer £17 plus per hour to carers and have office space and other over heads then the overall cost will be at least £30 plus per hour. Someone who requires 4 calls a day makes the cost too much. My experience when being contracted to Social services was they gave 1/4 hour call for lunch or evening calls Would you go out on a cold icy evening for 4 x 1/4 hour call???
I would not be in business today if i took on social service funded calls all my service users are privately funded but have a quality service with flexibility.