Ministers announced they were injecting cash into the health and social care system last month to help thousands of patients leave hospital either at home or in a care home as soon as possible in a bid to better prepare the NHS for next months. “Right now, one of the key challenges is getting patients out of hospital to more appropriate care facilities to free up beds and help improve ambulance response times,” then-secretary Thérèse Coffey said on Sept. 22. health and social care. “To tackle this, I can announce today that we are launching a £500m bailout fund for adult social care for this winter.” However, the Guardian has been told that none of the funding has materialised. Senior health and social care sources have described the government’s failure to release the promised cash as “inexplicable” and “outrageous”. More than 13,000 of the 100,000 NHS hospital beds in England currently contain ‘delayed discharge’ patients, which has led to overcrowding in A&E units and long delays in ambulance delivery. As a direct result, 999,000 patients are potentially ‘seriously harmed’ every month because ambulances are stuck outside hospitals. The revelation comes after Coffey, demoted to environment secretary this week by new prime minister Rishi Sunak, took to Twitter on Tuesday to herald her 50 days in charge of the NHS and social care. “Thank you very much to my great ministerial team [at the Department of Health and Social Care],” she wrote. “We accomplished a lot together in seven weeks.” The £500m adult social care discharge fund was intended to ease the pressure on hospitals by ensuring patients who doctors have judged well enough to leave can be discharged safely either to their homes or to a care home. Ministers said the £500m would help hospitals, care home operators and home care providers, which mainly help frail older people living at home with tasks such as eating, dressing and getting out of bed. “The local NHS will work with councils on targeted plans for specific care packages to support people either at home or in the wider community,” Coffey said when he announced the cash injection last month. “This £500m acts as a down payment to balance funding for health and social care as we develop our long-term plans.” The NHS Confederation, which represents the health and care system in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, called on the new health and social care secretary, Steve Barclay, to make freeing up the cash an “immediate priority”. “NHS and local authority leaders have yet to see a penny of this investment or any official detail of how it will be shared,” said Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation. “Currently only two-fifths of hospital patients are able to leave when they are ready, partly because of problems accessing social care, yet health leaders do not yet know how or when the £500m will be released into the system . So close to winter, this is unbelievable. Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. “We have a new prime minister who health leaders hope will bring stability to the government and break the political paralysis that has consumed Whitehall. Vital public services and the communities they serve are currently paying the price for this political chaos. “Without the immediate release of the adult social care discharge fund, the prospect of a winter crisis for the NHS is extremely high and so the government really needs to act now.” Labor MP Wes Streeting, the shadow health and social care secretary, said: “The NHS is facing its biggest crisis in its history and the chaos in the Conservative party is preventing them from fixing it. “Even the band-aids promised to the NHS and nursing homes to get them through the winter have not been delivered.” Asked why the £500 million emergency fund had not materialized, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Social Care said: “We are working to finalize the details of the distribution and these will be announced as soon as possible.”
