21 Islanders have been sent to the mainland for care – at a cost to the taxpayer of £1.9million – due to a lack of care placements on the Isle of Wight.
The mainland care placements were used, between April and September, to ease pressure on the Island’s adult social care sector — and to make discharge easier from the Island’s only hospital, St Mary’s in Newport.
In recent months, the hospital has been gridlocked by bed blockers. Patients ready to go home were not able to leave, as no care packages were in place — at times affecting whole wards — and in turn, there weren’t enough beds for new patients.
The Isle of Wight Council says it had no choice but to send some patients with specific care needs to the mainland, with their permission, due to the lack of capacity on the Island.
In 21 cases, the council suspended a longer, more cost-effective process, due to the urgent need to take action, resulting in a bill for £1,901,000. In quieter times, the council must go through a full, competitive process, allowing multiple bidders to compete for a care contract. However, in these 21 cases, the system was bypassed and waivers were issued.
Speaking at the council’s audit committee earlier this week, Councillor Chris Jarman called the use of waivers a crisis. He said the Island had seen care homes closing recently and too few new ones opening — lengthening the problems.
To ease the pressure in the sector, £222,000 has been spent to increase home care capacity on the Island, by employing carers from the mainland.
Councillor Karl Love, the council’s adult social care lead, said teams have been working hard to manage the pressure but are dealing with increasingly complicated cases, involving patients who need greater levels of support.
Why on earth should it cost nearly £100,000 to care for someone? The amount the council are agreeing to pay is a joke. Even if care was needed 24/7 it shouldn’t cost anything like that. I care for my elderly mother 24/7 and I get £67 a week for it.
It such a shame so many care homes have had to close adding to these problems and that the families of these patients can’t or won’t look after them.
What a terrible state our country is in.
Stop using my name, even tho i agree with you on this one point.
Glad I’ve had all my COVID & flu jabs, best way to help society and the NHS.
Obviously you do not understand what bed blocking means.
Good luck with that lol
Wouldn’t have had such an issue if the fools hadn’t mandated a jab for a job in care – they just shot theirselves in the foot with that stupid plan, as so many left the care sector and refuse to return. They all have better paying jobs elsewhere.
Absolutely correct!!
Exactly and far less pressure. Actually Caring for people isn’t the problem, it’s everything else that’s ‘put’ on you, along with it that makes the job a Nightmare!!
Well said,many care workers worked thru the pandemic with crappy Ppi when it eventually arrived!,had people sent back to them that the hospitals knowingly discharged with Covid,before the vaccine landed and the pay is sometimes below the National wage!is it any wonder they left!?A decent wage,and not being made to feel it’s the last resort for a job may help?
An outrageous bill, paid for by the council tax payers. May be pressure Mr Love, but it’s total abuse of hard pressed taxpayers. Council simply milk working families for this and all there other failures to control costs.
Now here is an idea. Instead of sending the poor unfortunate “bedblockers” whose only wrong doing was getting old, to the mainland, how about IoW social services commandeering a few nice hotels on the island and moving them there. Add to that on tap GP services, dental treatment and access to lawyers (and don’t forget a bit of spending money each week for life’s little luxuries)
Oh no, of course not, they have paid into the system all their lives so lets not treat them with dignity and understanding….
Ah well, if they had arrived here in a rubber dinghy, then of course they would have got hotel accommodation. But, as for on tap GP services and dental services, you are taking the p++s
Just asking for parity with the dinghy divers.
From the top of the page on the Btirish Medical association page… “In all four nations of the UK, refugees and asylum seekers with an active application or appeal are fully entitled to free NHS care”
As the individual would not have been in the country long enough or in one place long enough to register with a GP I would assume the GP goes to them. Now I know assumption is the mother of all ‘uckups, but I think it is a pretty accurate statement.
They did exactly that during lockdown and it worked, repeated it this Spring (under instruction from NGS England – Government – and it was a disaster). It may be that the patients transferred to North Island had complex medical/psychiatric needs which could not be met on IoW.
Brilliant. It would also help to have them all in one or two spots – make for easier visits by the various bodies involved. Save on mileage claims and be more productive all round.
Nice empty hospital in East Cowes …….
Yes, but no-one to staff it. Therein lies the core of the problem…
What are they doing about it? Not a sustainable policy.
Typical council, they forced Cornelia House in Ryde loosing 21 care beds, then spend almost £2 million on mainland care bed’s to get rich companies for only a few weeks. They could of invested a much smaller amount and support care homes from closing thus not only saving huge amounts of money in long run,but also saved jobs, kept the elderly residents on the Island so friends and family could visit etc. Council needs to plan ahead and not react to crises, speed up discharge and do assessments once settled, they are so into saving a few hundred pounds and then spend many thousands for a poorer service. They need to learn from other Authorities.
If the councils paid the care homes a decent rate for looking after people, then more care homes would be happy to take council funded residents instead of having to charge self funded people so much to cover their running costs. I know of one person who has council funded respite care being told they had to have their bed changed for a cheaper version because they were council funded, not self funded. OK, it pushes up the expenditure, but not to the extent that 21 people cost nearly £2 million
And increase your local taxes to pay reasonable wages.
Agree with you, because council pay less then care homes release less in favour of private funded,but because private funded costs are high people’s money soon runs out and then have to be council funded and moved. Eg if council funded was higher then private could be lower ( home’s need to cover running costs and small profit) meaning private can pay longer and possibly not needing full council funding so council still save money. Why does council not employ more carers in Wight Care to support care homes instead of expensive Agencies?.
‘Bed blockers’ is a dreadful derogatory term that implies that they are deliberately causing problems by their presence. It is hardly their fault that insufficient care home places are available.
” Cases “, ” bedblockers”. Human beings in need of care in a careless society, due to a careless Government.
This government didn’t shut down all the other hospitals on the Island but blame them for everything. It was a Labour government that started putting out all the jobs in hospitals and prisons etc
Funny, that.
I could easily get a dr or dentist appointment in 2010 when the last Labour Government was in power.
There wasn’t a care crisis.
There weren’t ambulances queuing outside A&E.
Waiting lists were some of the shortest ever.
But, hey, you go on believing the Daily Mail like a good little Tory drone.
It seems to me that a large part of the delays in discharge might be the requirement to call for multiple bidders to compete for contracts. We are not going to get anywhere until patients are looked upon as PEOPLE not just sources of income.
And we aren’t going to get anywhere until health and care workers are not just looked upon as disposable work units.
Perhaps if the government hadn’t insisted on sacking swathes of care workers who refused experimental drugs then there would be more spaces available???
Funny the government can find 7m a day to house boat people in hotels no problem
When will the council, government and our own idiot mp seeley push for what we really need here. Another hospital.We don’t need another load of shops put in at the old newport football ground we need another hospital. But then again it is the agenda of the sunak army to kill off all those who are a burden on the finances anyway (the poor, the old and the disabled) strong words I know, but it is happening. Wake up.
I will collect a bed blocker and they can have the spare room at my house for 100k
I have direct experience of trying to get someone home and found the Council to be a total hindrance. It took weeks – completely unnecessarily – due directly to their incompetence. I was disgusted by the process. All my dealings with the Council’s Adult Social Care were a disaster.
Must agree, every time you approach them there comes a hold up as they need to do this or that before they can confirm your need etc. All delay the end need and consequently the patients cannot be moved. There are so many laws surround things now they are like invisible barriers preventing anything being achieved. I can understand why we have safeguarding, but we also have common sense (hopefully) and some matters can be sorted later rather than waiting for the ‘i’s and ‘t’s to be actioned.
I too, was just passed around the system while they did their ‘box ticking’ exercise. I got nowhere! All I was hoping for was a couple of weeks of help, I will do the other 50 weeks a year. So shortsighted, if I ‘go under’ they will have another 2 very elderly people to look after.Not rocket science – just give me a tiny bit of help
We have young people moving away combined with an influx of those moving here to retire.
If you think the situation is bad now, give it a few years. Even more old people to care for, even fewer people to care for them.
Correct, but it isn’t just an IoW issue. The island is only one of 10 NHS trust areas that are having major difficulties. In fact we are low down the league of figures.
Whatever government gets in (or remains) in power they need to address and implement a major healthcare reform and not just hope it will go away.
I know they are hoping to kill off a few pensioners this winter but probably not enough to make a difference.
This is happening year after year, perhaps now IS THE TIME they think about building another hospital to support the numbers of people moving to the Island. They should NEVER HAVE SOLD OFF THE COTTAGE HOSPITALS FOR SUCH A LOW PRICE, if they were still around this could be the recovery zone for the people to hopefully return to their own homes, or a care placement. Why do Councils and even the NHS system never look further than the end of their noses? Forward planning does mean investment first for the benefit of future generations, we seem to be going backwards.
Nothing to do with the closure of the cottage hospitals.
The problem is lack of staff. The *current* hospital can’t fill 10% of the current vacancies, let alone another entire hospital.
Hospitals and care homes don’t care for people. Other people do.
Trouble is the Tories have spent the last 12 years devaluing care as a profession.
The gap used to be filled by E Europeans, but Brexit killed that.
Quite simply that is rubbish.
Explain why that is rubbish. Provide relevant figures.
You won’t because you can’t.
This situation has been going on pre Covid, and it wasn’t around when the Cottage Hospitals were open. The pay and staffing situation is relatively new considering the history of the hospitals ability to take patients. Due to Cottage Hospitals having a lower need of medical knowledge they were staffed with the minimum of medically trained staff and provided an excellent service to the occupants who were finally discharged home or to care homes in better health than when they went in. Look at all the numbers that were discharged still with Covid to care homes, the truth will always come out.
Let’s look at when these hospitals closed, shall we?
Royal County: 1992
Frank James: 2002
Royal National Hospital (Ventnor): 1964
Fairlee Hospital : 1982 Now Mountbatten Hospice
Whitecroft: 1992
Longford: 1955
Ventnor Cottage: 1969
So, basically, we have had only St Mary’s for the last 20 years.
Odd how “this situation” didn’t exist for the first 12 to 15 years of only having one hospital, isn’t it?
Yes, you are correct. The “truth always comes out”. The question is, can you accept it? Can you accept it has nothing to do with Bricks and Mortar? Can you accept that the only things that correlate with “this situation” arising are:
The Conservative Government.
Brexit.
Covid.
Choose.
since 1972 the utterly incompetent management of the Islands NHS closed 4 hospitals and over 300 elderly care beds and now they whine that they cannot provide enough beds and reduced the status of St Mary’s to that of a cottage hospital with a horrendous number of “manager” and not enough front line staff and because of this decline it is almost impossible to attract highly qualified medical staff and nurses resulting in the complete inability to treat anyone with serious illnesses needing specialist care.
Give St Mary’s Hospital £1.9 million to pay staff more money. That will attract more staff to work here. Simples.
Private. Medical. Insurance. Its coming.get used to it.
Social care re-care home is already private for the vast majority of elderly people. If you have a house or even very modest savings you will be laying out around £50,000 a year for the privilege.
Not “simples”. Aside from things like London weighting, all NHS staff are on national pay scales. This is precisely so that rich regions can’t poach staff from poor regions.
The other issue is that pay is an ongoing cost. Considering the IW NHS wages bill is around £140 million a year, £1.9 million amounts to an increase of 1.36% in pay for a single year. Nurses pay has fallen by 8% in, in real terms, since 2010, to make good on that, which is nessecery to stop the mass exodus from the profession, would cost an extra £11 million every year. And that would need to increase in line with inflation to stop the same rot from setting in again.
It’s a shame they had to go to the mainland. where they get the costs from I don’t know carers need to be paid a decent wage then there would not be a problem