Up to £200 million is to be provided to the NHS to buy thousands of extra beds in care homes and other settings to free up hospital beds.

The announcement follows an emergency meeting between Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and NHS leaders this weekend.

Up to £200 million of additional funding, which comes on top of the £500 million Adult Social Care Discharge Fund, is to be provided to support stays of up to four weeks per patient until the end of March.

The funding is designed to free up hospital beds so people can be admitted more quickly from A&E to wards, reducing pressure on emergency departments and speeding up ambulance handovers. There are currently around 13,000 people occupying hospital beds in England who are fit to be discharged. 

An additional £50 million in funding is being made available to expand hospital discharge lounges and ambulance hubs.

Health and social care secretary Steve Barclay said: “The NHS is under enormous pressure from Covid and flu, and on top of tackling the backlog caused by the pandemic, Strep A and upcoming strikes, this winter poses an extreme challenge.

“I am taking urgent action to reduce pressure on the health service, including investing an additional £200 million to enable the NHS to immediately buy up beds in the community to safely discharge thousands of patients from hospital and free up hospital capacity, on top of the £500 million we’ve already invested to tackle this issue.

“In addition, we are trialling six National Discharge Frontrunners – innovative, quick solutions which could reduce discharge delays, moving patients from hospital to home more quickly.”

Professor Martin Green OBE, chief executive of Care England, told Caring Times: “The government has already put £500 million into discharge to assess, which was focused on ensuring people moved out of hospital at the correct time. Clearly this has failed, and I am not sure what this new initiative is going to do differently. The government constantly makes the same mistakes and talks to the wrong people, which is why they never get the right answer to how to reform social care and deliver a sustainable NHS.”

Nadra Ahmed CBE, executive chairman of the National Care Association and chairman of the Care Provider Alliance, told us: “Any funding to support the sector is welcome and it will start to make a difference to those who no longer need to occupy an acute bed. What we need to ensure is that wraparound services are available in the community to support providers ensuring that they have access to expert clinical advice as/if required. We need to move away from the short-term fixes and ensure that a more sustainable solution can be developed going forward and until and unless government is prepared to do this we will continue to lurch from crisis to crisis.”