Senior doctors and nurses at the Isle of Wight NHS Trust have appealed to residents to support St Mary’s Hospital as it deals with increasing demand for services.
As of today (Thursday), there are 71 people currently being cared for in hospital who do not need to be there – the equivalent of 3 full wards. These people should be in the right place to meet their needs, whether that’s at home or in a different care setting such as a care home.
NHS bosses have appealed to Islanders, patients, their families and friends to help ease the pressure on services.
Steve Parker, Medical Director, said:
“We are doing everything we can to help people leave hospital when they are medically able to. But we need the public’s help.
“We all know about the pressure that our colleagues are under in adult social care – placements are hard to come by and their staff are dealing with similar challenges to the NHS.
“We need Islanders to do their bit to help ease the pressure. In the last fortnight we’ve seen people refusing or delaying their discharge and we know that many patients could go home but need the help of relatives and friends to enable them to do so.”
“We have seen several examples of people declining social care placements because they didn’t want to travel between towns to visit their relatives in a care home a few miles away.”
Article continues below this advertisement
NHS leaders fear that this could be driving some of the pressure for placements in adult social care and that more people may end up being placed on the mainland as a result.
Juliet Pearce, Director of Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professionals, at Isle of Wight NHS Trust said:
“All patients are assessed prior to being discharged from hospital to ensure every reasonable step is taken to ensure their safety, but we are seeing a mismatch between needs and expectations in some cases. This means that that people who need to be admitted to a ward for clinical reasons are waiting in the Emergency Department for excessive lengths of time.
“We must be able to get patients home who don’t need to be in a hospital to safely care for acutely sick and unwell patients.”
Understanding the problems at St Mary’s hospital why not turn the empty Frank James hospital to a converlesant recovery centre for bed blocks using staff with medical care skill to help recovery.The more houses that get built here will mean more care will need more investment it’s basic stuff
The problem isn’t one of building space, but one of lack of staff. Please explain where you would obtain these “staff with medical care skill”.
Completely agree.
Maybe these downvoting geniuses would like to suggest where they would magic extra staff from?
Way too easy to click the down-thumb before engaging what passes as your brains, isn’t it?
Re employ all the NHS staff they sacked for not wanting that jab!
We have seen several examples of people declining social care placements because they didn’t want to travel between towns to visit their relatives in a care home a few miles away.”
…
then simply tell them – take the placement or you are out on the front doorstep of the hospital – the hospital is for the sick to heal, not a place for hangers on, burdening the NHS with their presence when they are fit enough to leave.
Bed blockers!….these people have paid in to the system all of their lives. They are now just an inconvenience. Totally shocking…..god help us all
Like it or not, it is what they are. They are people who shouldn’t be in hospital blocking access to a bed for people who should.
The question you’re not asking, while pouring scorn on the unfortunate unwell is: where are the improvements to social care we were promised, and charged extra on our council tax to provide? Idiot.
Nobody was “pouring scorn”. What Cal said is a fact.
Another fact you need to face is that the fault for all of this lies squarely with Central Government. It is their policies that cut the amount of money we get and those cuts that have caused the increase in council tax for, not only no improvement in services, but a large deterioration.
Bob Seely voted for those cuts and then failed to deliver on his vaunted Island Deal.
The downvoters need to get their heads out of the sand and recognise the truth when it is being told however unpleasant that truth is.
Have a word with the 2 tory wannabes that are heading here, not that they will take any notice, green card “sunak” is probably looking for a nice big hideaway down here, and as for thatcher, oh no, I mean truss, well I have said enough I think.
The entire state of our health services and the country in general is down to the Tories. They have been in power for 12 years and we have seen nothing but year-on-year the NHS getting worse.
They, and their apologists, can no longer use the “but Labour” excuse. Everything that is wrong with the country is down to them.
Oh, “global crisis” they say. Funny how that is a valid excuse for the Tories but not for Gordon Brown. Can’t have it both ways but Tories always want to have their cake and eat it.
IThe problem is that care costs are huge and there are nowhere near enough places.
For many families, taking time off work to care for elderly relatives at home isn’t an option. Families today require both partners to be in work to pay the rent/mortgage and bills. Particular now inflation is outstripping wages and spiraling energy costs.
There is a particular problem on the Island where so many elderly people have retired here from the mainland. These people have no local family to care for them. On the flip side there are elderly native Islanders whose children have all left the Island because of its poor job prospects.
Simple answer – build a bigger hospital. – we’re going to need it once all the (un)affordable new houses have been built anyway.
As someone else already pointed out. You can build as many hospitals as you like, but there will be nobody to staff them. This is down to the Government abolishing the nursing bursary, the year-on-year pay cuts and the atrocious working conditions.
We used to infil with overseas nurses, but Brexit and the the government getting tough on immigration put a stop to that.
If only they got tough on ILLEGAL immigration then that would be one less pressure off our already overstretched resources.
If relatives refuse to allow patients to go home they should be charged!
Last time I checked I didn’t have parental responsibility for my mother-in-law…
Well you should have a moral responsibility to care for her, lazy British attitude.
A hospital is for the sick if the patient is well enough to leave they should leave luckily our health service is good not like many European countries where the family are expected to feed and wash the patient and to sleep on a sofa next to the bed spain is one country
It’s not lucky it’s that they’re unlucky! We’ve all paid our dues and deserve much better thank you very much. Hospitals aren’t care homes or hostels no they’re not in an ideal world but it isn’t is it. Some people are ‘well’ or ‘not ill with their original problem’ but still need help or care at home that can’t be easily just provided by family. It takes time and money There aren’t any care packages available and people are entitled to that service. It’s not the families sole responsibility to be carers. Some are ill or old themselves remember
Academic report below(and please before anyone says “our NHS” is free at point of access for all, in most European countries that is the case as well and survival rates for cancer are MUCH higher..)
Compared to other countries, the UK does not spend a particularly high proportion of its national wealth on health care, while a decade of historically low funding increases has left services facing huge pressures and a workforce crisis. Like levels of taxation and public spending more generally, how much is spent on health is a political choice and politicians should be honest with the public about the standards of care they can expect with the levels of funding provided.
From British Medical Journal
The UK has been ranked 16th in a wide ranging assessment of 35 national health systems in Europe, just below Portugal (13th), the Czech Republic (14th) and Estonia (15th).
Switzerland topped the latest rankings, followed by the Netherlands and then Norway, while in last place was Albania, preceded by Romania and Hungary.
The rankings were published in the 2018 survey by the Euro Health Consumer Index (EHCI),1 which has been producing annual assessments of the performance of national healthcare systems in Europe since 2005.
From guardian newspaper
Cancer survival rates in the UK continue to lag behind those of other European countries, research suggests, with experts flagging the need for earlier diagnosis and improved access to treatments.
The report is the latest to highlight the problem, with previous research suggesting that UK survival rates for breast cancer are a decade behind countries including France and Sweden
Remember the last time they emptied the beds during Covid-19 it was the biggest scandal of the Covid lock down