Oliver Dowden – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Oliver Dowden on 2016-09-13.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, if the Government will consider setting up a system of Finnish-style care packages for elderly people leaving hospital and going into care homes.

David Mowat

Despite a welcome shift towards more care provision in community settings, our ageing population means a growing number of people require care in care and nursing homes, with an increasing level of acuity and complexity of need.

The Enhanced Health in Care Homes vanguards, implemented by NHS England, are beginning to show how addressing this inequity in access to services can reduce unnecessary, unplanned and avoidable admissions to hospital, shorten the length of hospital stays and improve peoples’ quality of life, wellbeing and clinical outcomes.

NHS England is also leading the multi-agency Community Services and Hospital Discharge programme, which will deliver a series of interventions to transform community services and improve discharge of older people from hospital. These include initiatives such as “discharge to assess”, which will increase the number of patients who are discharged quickly and safely to their usual place of residence.

The Department is not aware of a clothing grant for people who enter care homes and is therefore unable to consider reinstatement. Where a local authority arranges care and support to meet an adult’s eligible needs, it may charge them. Where care is arranged in a care home, a local authority must not, through charges, reduce the adult’s income below the Personal Expenses Allowance of £24.90 per week.

The allowance means that local authority supported care home residents have money to spend as they wish on personal items, including clothing. It must not be spent on meeting their eligible care needs.

Local authorities have discretion to be more generous where they think this would be appropriate.