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# County council given £3million funding boost to help provide social care and ease winter pressures in Staffordshire
- URL: https://lichfieldlive.co.uk/county-council-given-3million-funding-boost-to-help-provide-social-care-and-ease-winter-pressures-in-staffordshire/
- Published: 2023-01-19T08:54:29.000Z
- Updated: 2023-01-19T08:57:26.000Z
- Description: Staffordshire County Council has been handed £3million by the Government to help provide social care and ease winter pressures on health services.
- Author: Kerry Ashdown, Local Democracy Reporter
- Tags: Health, Politics, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2026-07-22 19:07, News

Staffordshire County Council has been handed £3million by the Government to help provide social care and ease winter pressures on health services.

The one-off Social Care Discharge Fund will be used to ensure services are in place for residents who are medically fit for discharge from hospital.

A number of hospital trusts across the country have declared “critical incidents” this winter, but Staffordshire is experiencing “no delays to discharge for people waiting for social care”, county councillor Julia Jessel told fellow cabinet members at a meeting yesterday (18th January).

The cabinet member for health and care said:

> “There are a lot of fairly dramatic headlines about bed-blockers and social care services not being able to cope with discharge from hospital.  
>  
> “I can say that within Staffordshire, thanks to a lot of hard work by NHS and our own staff and the fact we have a fully integrated discharge service, the situation is very much different. We’re not complacent and we’re doing everything we can to support the NHS.  
>  
> “The narrative that tends to hit the headlines is that it is all down to social care. In Staffordshire it isn’t – elsewhere it might be quite different.  
>  
> “There are delays to discharge. I know the figures for Stoke’s hospital last week and not an insignificant number of people were in a hospital bed who were medically fit for discharge, but that was not down to waiting on social care. It was waiting on their own systems, for prescriptions, for a doctor to sign a discharge or arranging transport and these are problems that have been around for decades.  
>  
> “One of the issues is people are admitted to hospital and it’s actually not the best place for them, particularly those at end of life. They get admitted as an emergency and some of them wait in ambulances for several hours plus A&E departments – for somebody at the end of their life that is not the place any of us would like to see our last few hours on this planet.”  
>  
> Cllr Julia Jessel, Staffordshire County Council

Around £854,000 of the £3million funding is earmarked for home care, alongside £579,000 for care homes, £182,000 for additional assessment capacity, £414,000 for voluntary sector, housing, assistive technology and equipment and £739,000 for measures to recruit and retain the social care workforce.

Cllr Jessel said:

> “I’ve written to the Secretary of State thanking them for the additional finance that we have been allocated that has to be spent by the end of March.  
>  
> “But I believe if we were given funding at an earlier point at the financial year and ongoing funding we could deliver far better value for money for the taxpayer and a far better service for the people that we serve in Staffordshire.  
>  
> “One could address these longer-term difficult to address issues that can’t be tackled in three months on a one-yearly basis.  
>  
> “It is something we are going to have to tackle in the future and I do hope Government listens and gives social services some longer-term financing so that we can work with partners, voluntary sector, NHS and other organisations to address this particular issue.  
>  
> “It would mean people at end of life have a far more dignified exit from this world and at the same time alleviate the pressures on the NHS and enable them to deal with those patients who can have life-transforming input.”  
>  
> Cllr Julia Jessel, Staffordshire County Council