Tag: Department of Health and Social Care

• Backed by up to £200 million, local areas will buy thousands of extra beds in care homes and other settings to help discharge more patients who are fit to leave hospital and free up hospital beds for those who need them
• Discharged patients will be given the support they need from GPs, nurses and other community-based clinicians to continue their recovery
• Additional £50 million capital funding to upgrade and expand hospitals including new ambulance hubs and facilities for patients about to be discharged
• As part of measures set to be announced later today, six national ‘Discharge Frontrunners’ will lead the way to explore new long-term initiatives to free up hospital beds

Thousands of extra medically fit patients will be discharged from hospitals into community care settings, such as care homes, over the coming weeks to free up hospital beds and reduce pressure on the NHS, the Health and Social Care Secretary Steve Barclay is set to announce today [Monday 9 December].

The government will make available up to £200 million of additional funding to immediately buy short-term care placements to allow people to be discharged safely from hospitals into the community where they will receive the care they need to recover before returning to their homes.

The move will 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.

The additional £200 million – on top of the £500 million Adult Social Care Discharge Fund already announced which reached the frontline in December and is already helping discharge people more quickly – will fund maximum stays of up to four weeks per patient until the end of March. Integrated care boards – organisations that arrange health services in each local area – will begin booking beds that are most appropriate to patients’ needs.

The government is immediately making available additional £50 million in capital funding to expand hospital discharge lounges and ambulance hubs. Ambulance queues in some areas are made worse due to a lack of physical space – the new money will create new ambulance hubs where vehicles can manoeuvre more easily to avoid delays handing over patients. The funding boost will also expand discharge lounges in NHS Trusts – areas where patients can be moved out of acute beds while they wait to be discharged, freeing up beds in the meantime.

In a statement in Parliament later today, the Health and Social Care Secretary will outline a series of further measures to address current pressures facing the NHS over winter, including long waits for emergency care and delays to discharging patients who are medically fit to leave hospital.

This will include six areas trialling innovative long-term solutions to free up hospital beds and make sure patients get the right care at the right time, which could be rolled out across the NHS if successful.

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.

Sussex Health and Care, the Northern Care Alliance, Humber and North Yorkshire, One Croydon Alliance, Leeds Health and Care Partnership and Warwickshire Place have all put forward ideas that will help the patients in their area move out of hospital more quickly whilst providing continuity of care. These ideas include dedicated dementia hubs, new offers of provision for rehabilitative care and creating effective data tools to help manage demand for discharge of medically fit patients – giving them the help they need to live comfortably in the community after a hospital stay.

This new programme will trial long term solutions to issues which result in patients staying in hospital longer than necessary. For example one area, Leeds, is looking to improve how health teams in their local hospitals are working with those providing community services such as rehabilitation, which will mean better support locally for patients who need support after a hospital stay.

Prolonged stays in a hospital bed can contribute to poorer outcomes, particularly for older people, with increased muscle loss making rehabilitation harder, as well at the ongoing risk of exposure to infections and the impact on mental health. These delays also have a knock-on impact for other people, including those awaiting elective care and those needing urgent medical treatment.

The new measures follow the Prime Minister’s speech last week on building a better future, where he set out one of his key promises that NHS waiting lists will fall and people will get the care they need more quickly.

Minister for Care Helen Whately said:

Getting people out of hospital on time is more important than ever. It’s good for patients and it helps hospitals make space for those who need urgent care.

We’re launching six Discharge Frontrunners to lead the way with innovations to help get people out of hospital and back home.

Winter is always hard for the NHS and social care, and this year especially with flu in high circulation. That’s why we provided the £500 million Adult Social Care Discharge Fund earlier in the winter.

As well as helping people right now, we’re looking ahead to make our health and care system work better next winter and beyond. These problems are not new but now is the time to fix them for the future.

People eligible for a Covid booster and flu vaccine is advised to take up the offer as soon as possible to protect themselves and others, and reduce pressure on the NHS.

In total, up to £14.1 billion additional funding will be invested by government over the next two years to improve urgent and emergency care and tackle the backlog – the highest spend on health and care in any government’s history. £7.5 billion of this support is for adult social care and discharge over the next two years which will also help deal with immediate pressures.

The NHS is rolling out virtual wards across England as part of plans to deliver the equivalent of 7,000 more beds using a mix of hospital and virtual wards. The NHS has an ambition to set up 40-50 virtual beds per 100K population by 2024. Virtual wards as where people, for example, who have acute respiratory infections can actually be treated at home with telemedicine or pulse oximeters and there is also a new fall service which can save about 55,000 ambulance call outs a year by treating people with falls at home.

91 Community Diagnostic Centres have been opened so far, delivering over 2.7 million tests, checks and scans already to help diagnose patients earlier.

The government is also continuing to grow the NHS workforce, with around 42,000 more staff than a year ago, including over 10,500 more nurses and almost 4,700 more doctors.

Sarah-Jane Marsh, National Director of Urgent and Emergency Care said:

There is no doubt the NHS is under pressure with latest weekly data showing flu cases in hospital increased by almost half putting additional strain on already busy wards and departments.

We want to ensure all patients ready to leave hospital do so quickly and safely, and NHS staff are working closely with local authority colleagues to help get more patients out of hospital when they are medically fit to do so.

We hope the frontrunner programme will offer new solutions for local systems to help patients access the services they need and help to free up bed space in NHS hospitals.

Background

The frontrunners are:

• Sussex Health and Care Integrated Care System: Trialling a new data tool to help services manage performance, give operational oversight and manage demand.
• The Northern Care Alliance: Trialling specialised dementia hubs to support people who have a greater chance of re-admission.
• Humber and North Yorkshire Integrated Care System: Supporting patients to move across health and social care organisations through innovative use of data and real-time intelligence.
• One Croydon Alliance: Trialling a fully integrated team between acute and community, integrated IT system, integrated financial systems and integrated leadership, to better coordination between hospitals and community care settings like rehabilitation services.
• Leeds Health and Care Partnership: Focused on intermediate care, establishing an Active Recovery Service providing short term community rehabilitation and reablement. Focus on rehabilitation and reablement not only improves patient experience but helps prevent future re-admission.
• Warwickshire Place: Trialling a partnership between NHS and Social Care to help provide care and support to patients when they are released from hospital into the community, increasing capacity for home care, and expanding recruitment.

• Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Steve Barclay to sign Memorandum of Understanding with BioNTech SE today to bring innovative vaccine research to England with the potential to transform outcomes for cancer patients.
• The collaboration will aim to deliver 10,000 personalised therapies to UK patients by 2030 through a new research and development hub creating jobs and strengthening the UK’s position as a leader in global life sciences.
• The new partnership will help accelerate clinical trials of personalised immunotherapies for cancer and infectious disease vaccines.

Trials into vaccines for cancer and wider diseases will accelerate after the government reached a historic agreement with a leading biopharmaceutical firm to bring revolutionary research to England.

A Memorandum of Understanding will be signed today by Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Steve Barclay and the Germany-based company BioNTech that previously developed a world-leading Covid-19 vaccine with Pfizer.

The agreement means cancer patients will get early access to trials exploring personalised mRNA therapies, like cancer vaccines. No two cancers are the same and mRNA vaccines will contain a genetic blueprint to stimulate the immune system to attack cancer cells.

Access to the trials will be via the Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad which is being developed by NHS England and Genomics England.

The launch pad will help to rapidly identify large numbers of cancer patients who could be eligible for the trials and explore potential vaccines across multiple types of cancer. Trials for innovative treatments could start as early as Autumn 2023.

The partnership will aim to help patients with early and late-stage cancers. If successfully developed, the cancer vaccines could become part of standard care.

Health and Social Care Secretary, Steve Barclay said:

Once cancer is detected, we need to ensure the best possible treatments are available as soon as possible, including for breast, lung and pancreatic cancer.

BioNTech helped lead the world on a Covid-19 vaccine and they share our commitment to scientific advancement, innovation and cutting-edge scientific technology, making them perfect partners for a deal to work together on cancer vaccines.

This partnership will mean that, from as early as September, our patients will be among the first to participate in trials and tests to provide targeted, personalised and precision treatments using transformative new therapies to both treat the existing cancer and help stop it returning.

This agreement builds on this government’s promise to increase research and development spending to £20 billion per year and demonstrates the UK remains one of the most attractive places in the world for innovative companies to invest in research, trial new treatments and treat patients more effectively

Building on the lessons learnt during the pandemic – including the development of a Covid-19 vaccine – the partnership will enable the government and BioNTech to harness the country’s world-leading expertise in organisations such as the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and Genomics England.

The launch pad will complement the ongoing work of the NHS Genomic Medicine Service which helps patients access the latest testing technologies and ensures they are given more targeted precision treatments for their cancer with transformative approaches and better outcomes.

BioNTech’s investment will include setting up a new research and development hub and offices in the UK creating jobs and strengthening the UK’s position as a leader in global life sciences.

Minister for Health and Secondary Care, Will Quince said:

Getting a cancer diagnosis can be heart-breaking for patients and families. This partnership represents a giant leap towards achieving better outcomes for patients.

BioNTech has a proven and distinguished record in vaccine technology and contributed significantly to the development of a Covid-19 vaccine.

This partnership now has the potential to develop research leading to cancer therapies which could save lives.

Prof. Ugur Sahin, M.D, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of BioNTech:

The UK successfully delivered Covid-19 vaccines so quickly because the National Health Service, academia, the regulator and the private sector worked together in an exemplary way.

This agreement is a result of the lessons learnt from the Covid-19 pandemic. Drug development can be accelerated without cutting corners if everyone works seamlessly together towards the same goal. Today’s agreement shows we are committed to do the same for cancer patients.

Our goal is to accelerate the development of immunotherapies and vaccines using technologies we have been researching for over 20 years. The collaboration will cover various cancer types and infectious diseases affecting collectively hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

If successful, this collaboration has the potential to improve outcomes for patients and provide early access to our suite of cancer immunotherapies as well as to innovative vaccines against infectious diseases – in the UK and worldwide.

National Clinical Director for Cancer, Professor Peter Johnson said:

As we continue to drive forward efforts to diagnose cancers at the earliest possible stage, we also need to make sure we are looking at every opportunity to improve treatments. This new partnership will unlock the potential to develop revolutionary treatments in the UK to benefit NHS patients.

mRNA technology has the potential to be a transformative approach in a number of illnesses, and we hope that by finding out how to vaccinate people against their own cancers we can further improve their chances of staying cancer-free.

• New features added this year will enable users to receive notifications from their GPs and view and manage their hospital appointments, with healthcare information now at their fingertips
• Use of the NHS App is freeing up valuable clinician time with 1.7 million GP appointments booked and over 22 million repeat prescriptions ordered through the NHS App in the last 12 months

Millions more patients across England are benefitting from easier access to their health records and medical services through the NHS App, as sign ups top 30 million – including seven million new sign ups in 2022.

The app, which launched four years ago, was one of the most popular free health apps of 2022 – with more people accessing its range of features, including over 65 million GP record views. The government has already met its target to have 68% of people in England registered with the NHS App by March 2023 and is firmly on track to meet its second target to have 75% of people registered by 2024.

The app offers a digital front door for interacting with the NHS and has seen a host of new features launched in the last 12 months – empowering patients to access services from the comfort of their homes.

Health and Social Care Secretary Steve Barclay said:

Technology is transforming the way we use the NHS and with over 30 million sign ups to the NHS App across the country, including seven million this year alone, there is huge potential to modernise services for patients and staff.

In the last year alone 21 million repeat prescriptions have been ordered through the app, saving valuable time for clinicians and helping people access their treatment as easily as possible.

On top of this we have added innovative new features – from accessing GP records to booking Covid jabs – which will help us ease pressures on GPs and other primary care services and provide more effective, personalised care. If you haven’t already I’d encourage you to download the app and see how it can help you access the services you need.

The NHS App is supporting hardworking NHS staff as they work tirelessly to clear the Covid backlogs, freeing up valuable clinician time as well as empowering patients to have greater control over their health and care records.

A total of 1.7 million GP appointments were booked through the NHS App this year and a record breaking 22 million repeat prescriptions ordered, up from 9 million over the same period last year. 128,000 people also registered their organ donation decision through the NHS App.

Patients in many parts of the country are also able to view and manage their hospital appointments on the app – helping to build a modern, digital NHS. The new features include viewing all referrals and future hospital appointments in one place, accessing supporting information for appointments –such as hospital maps – along with booking, changing and cancelling appointments.

The new features are available to patients at 20 NHS Trusts across the country from York and Scarborough to Royal Cornwall – with another 24 trusts expected to be available by March 2023 – and has been used over 800,000 times.

Lords Minister For Technology Nick Markham said:

Millions of patients have continued to sign up to the NHS App, helping to generate a record number of views and modernise how our health service works.

We will continue to innovate and incorporate new features to ensure that patients can access convenient, high quality care when and where they need it.

Simon Bolton, Interim Chief Executive at NHS Digital, said:

The NHS App continues to change the way people in England access healthcare services. Since it was launched four years ago, millions of people have used it to book GP appointments, order repeat prescriptions and view GP records.

We’ve also added new features to the app to help people manage hospital appointments, book Covid vaccinations and receive messages from GPs. The NHS App is a great example of how technology can be used to help people take control of their healthcare and access NHS services quickly and easily.

Dr Vin Diwakar, medical director for transformation at NHS England, said:

It’s fantastic that the NHS App is already in the pockets of millions of people, providing easy access to crucial everyday NHS services like repeat prescriptions and GP appointment bookings.

Our vision is to transform the NHS App into a front door for the NHS, with many exciting new features and changes planned – delivering on the NHS’ Long Term Plan commitment to continue to harness the power of technology for patients and staff – which remains at the heart of our plans to innovate patient care for the 21st century.

People can also receive notifications from their GPs, a feature which has been rolled out across nearly 2,000 practices. Thanks to this effort over 700,000 messages to update patients including appointment reminders and test results have been successfully processed.

People are also benefitting from the ability to book a Covid vaccine appointment through the NHS App. More than 28,000 bookings have been made via this route in just four weeks since the feature was added in November, accounting for 9% of all bookings since this feature was enabled.

Thanks to these kind of features, millions of people are benefitting from easier and quicker access to NHS services – and the government will continue to build on the progress which has already been made.

New features in the app available next year will ensure patients can access more NHS services at their fingertips – including booking their flu vaccination and accessing hospital correspondence, such as pre-consultation questionnaires.

• Brainomix e-Stroke system reduced door in and out time from 140 to 79 minutes cutting lifesaving time off one of the most time sensitive diagnoses in medicine.
• Government funding has enabled more than 111,000 suspected stroke patients to benefit from this ground-breaking system across five stroke networks in England.

Tens of thousands of stroke patients across the country are benefitting from quicker treatment and improved outcomes thanks to government investment in cutting edge artificial intelligence (AI) to diagnose and determine the best treatment for patients who suffer a stroke.

Early-stage analysis of the technology, which received funding from the first round of the government’s AI in Health and Care Awards, shows it can reduce the time between presenting with a stroke and treatment by more than 60 minutes, and is associated with a tripling in the number of stroke patients recovering with no or only slight disability – defined as achieving functional independence – from 16 percent to 48 percent.

Trailblazing AI technologies are revolutionising the health and care system making it fit for the future. These ground-breaking diagnosis and treatment tools are not only helping improve patient outcomes, but freeing up valuable clinician time, supporting hard working NHS staff who are working tirelessly to tackle the Covid backlogs.

Health and Social Care Secretary Steve Barclay said:

AI has the potential to transform our NHS – delivering faster, more accurate diagnoses and making sure patients can get the treatment they need, when they need it.

Brainomix is an incredible example of how this can be achieved, using the power of AI to shave lifesaving minutes off one of the most time-sensitive diagnoses in medicine meaning patients get the treatment they need faster.

I am immensely proud the AI Awards continues to harness this innovation, empowering researchers across the country to deliver ground breaking new technologies which will transform our health and care system.

NHS England Director of Transformation Dr Timothy Ferris said:

Every minute saved during the initial hospital assessment of people with stroke-like symptoms can dramatically improve a patient’s chance of leaving hospital in good health.

The NHS is harnessing the potential that AI has to support expert staff in delivering life-changing care for patients with a range of needs, and through the AI in Health and Care awards we are testing, evaluating and supporting the most promising technologies which could transform the way we deliver care.

Strokes affects 85,000 people in England every year and getting into hospital and starting the right treatment quickly is key for making a good recovery.

The Brainomix e-Stroke system, developed in the UK, uses state-of-the-art AI algorithms to support doctors by providing real-time decision support in the interpretation of brain scans which help inform decisions for stroke patients, allowing more patients to get the right treatment, in the right place, at the right time.

The e-Stroke technology allows stroke specialists to access scans and images remotely and securely meaning they can do their job efficiently whilst supporting other hospitals deliver world leading stroke care. This supports clinicians working across Integrated Stroke Delivery Networks (ISDN), which bring together specialists from all parts of the stroke pathway to ensure more people who experience a stroke receive high-quality specialist care, from pre-hospital, through to early supported discharge, community specialist stroke-skilled rehabilitation and life after stroke.

Brainomix e-Stroke is currently deployed at sites spanning 11 stroke networks across the country, of which five have been funded through the AI in Health and Care Award. This funding has supported the detection of over 4,500 large vessel occlusions (LVO’s) in stroke patients. LVOs are one of the most time-sensitive diagnoses in medicine and early diagnosis can lead to better patient outcomes.

Teaching assistant and grandmother Carol Wilson was getting up for a normal day when she suffered from intense cramp and rapidly lost sight and use of her limbs in June 2021. She was transferred to hospital where, with the help of the Brainomix e-Stroke tool her consultant was able to rapidly diagnose a blood clot on her brain and recommend a thrombectomy. Thanks to the quick diagnosis and access to treatment, Carol has now recovered and is back at work and able to live her life as she was before the stroke.

Carol said:

This technology is just amazing. I was able to sit up and text my family later that day, and was back at home and able to walk around two days after having a stroke.

I often think about how lucky I am to have made the recovery I have – to be able to go back to work and spend time with my grandchildren – especially when you consider not everyone who has a stroke has such a good outcome.

Riaz Rahman, VP Healthcare Global, Brainomix, said:

The Brainomix e-Stroke platform has fast become a cornerstone of integrated stroke delivery networks (ISDN’s) ability to deliver best in class stroke care.  We have collated multiple examples of hard evidence, spanning several networks, confirming the use of e-Stroke helps deliver more consistent treatment decisions and faster patient transfers.  This is vitally important in a highly time sensitive pathway.

Having successfully deployed the system at pace and scale across the NHS, we have seen in some regions the tripling of post-operative patient functional scores and more than double the access to life saving mechanical thrombectomy treatment.

The AI in Health and Care Award, backed by £123 million, is run by the NIHR, Accelerated Access Collaboration at NHS England and the NHS AI Lab, and supports accelerating the testing and evaluation of cutting-edge technologies which have the potential for greatest patient and clinician benefit, improving patient outcomes and freeing up valuable clinician time.

The Award supports AI technologies across a range of developments, from initial feasibility to the point that they could be nationally commissioned.