Due to the ever increasing living wage and austerity measures for social funding, there has been an increasing amount of elderly people who are remaining in hospitals as there is nowhere else for them to go.
Data gathered reveals that elderly patients have collectively spent 2.5 million days stuck in hospitals over the past five years with this number increasing each year by 19%. These statistics reveal that the days spent waiting for discharge from hospital are primarily for the following reasons:
- 174,000 days were spent waiting for a residential home placement
- 216,000 days waiting for a nursing home placement
- 206,000 days waiting for social care workers and district nurses to get people back into their own homes
There are arguably many different solutions to this crisis.
What are HCPA doing to solve this?
Commissioned by Hertfordshire County Council, a technology initiative to help tackle the surge in elderly hospital patients and significant wait times in Hertfordshire was created to search Vacant Residential and Nursing beds: hertscarehomefinder.org.
The Herts Care Home Finder had over 200 Homes registered at launch with many more beds vacancies available. This web based service allows both the public and professionals to find, filter and get in touch with care homes and enquire the specialist care offered in much shorter time scales.
Potential benefits of this system include:
- Reduced Work load on Social workers
- Less time making phone calls
- Fast Results for vacancies
- Bespoke searches, filtering by location, care offered and facilities
- Publically searchable
As a member of HCPA this service is Fully Funded of charge. Even if you don’t currently have vacancies, this system ensures that your care home will be on radar with service seeking professionals and service users.
Herts Care Home Finder replaces what was previously slivers and is a very simple intuitive software which is designed to run on all devices including mobile phones and tablets.
Make sure your beds are being seen. Click here to find out more! www.hertscarehomefinder.org