THE Scottish Government has created a new unit focused on ending the bed blocking crisis.
The new directorate has been established to tackle the record volume of delayed discharge patients hampering the work of accident and emergency units.
The Social Care Resilience and Improvement directorate began life before Chistmas under Angie Wood, former head of Aberdeenshire health and social care partnership.
A source told the Herald the move was relatively unusual and reflected the high importance of the issue.
Other recent health directorates have handled the Covid vaccination programme and the official inquiries into the pandemic.
The source said: “It’s quite unusual, especially during a recruitment freeze, to put a new directorate together. It’s troubleshooting really. Searching for best practices and driving their use around the country to deal with delayed discharge.”
The new unit has yet to appear on the list of directorates on the Scottish Government website, although Ms Wood has been named as its director in one official document.
Nicola Sturgeon was yesterday briefed on a “nationwide re-assessment of hospital patients who are clinically safe to be discharged” to ease bed blocking.
All 14 regional health boards have been told to identify patients who can be safely discharged “without further delay” before the end of each month, either back home or to an interim placement in a care home.
Heath Secretary Humza Yousaf recently announced an £8million for an extra 300 interim care home beds to accelerate discharge rates.
Around 2,000 beds a day are taken by people medically fit to leave hospital, meaning A&Es struggle to admit new patients.
The First Minister chaired the Scottish Government’s resilience committee yesterday to discuss the impact of winter on health and care.
Pressures on the system remain “acute”, despite the proportion of A&E patients seen within the four-hour target edging up from 56 to 57.3 per cent last week.
Ms Sturgeon said: “It remains important to continue to pursue every avenue to improve the flow of patients through hospitals, and to ensure people are able to safely leave when they are fit for discharge.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel