In an effort to decrease the pressure on hospitals, handymen will be dispatched to repair shabby and moldy houses.
Amanda Pritchard, chief of the NHS, stated that home improvement could reduce overnight stay costs and admissions.
This could include installing handrails for elderly people to avoid falling, or cleaning out walls of mould to alleviate breathing difficulties among children.
Also, maintenance units are able to seal leaks and draughts.
Handymen will be called in by ‘urgent community response’ teams to fix patients’ homes in order to ease pressure on hospitals in England
Mrs Pritchard said handymen would be called in by ‘urgent community response’ teams that operate across two thirds of England.
The teams – a collaboration between the NHS and councils – combine GPs, nurses and social workers. Any repair would not be covered by the health system, but town halls. NHS England hopes all parts of the country will offer a complete service by April next year.
Mrs Pritchard said: ‘There are some great examples out there of how NHS and councils are working hand in hand – care workers alongside clinicians – to provide a rapid two-hour response, 24 hours a day, to those who need it.
‘Without that, the kind of people we’re talking about would often require an ambulance response, in some cases a conveyance to A&E and an admission at the end of the journey. For frailer individuals, we know that one night could turn into several if the right care plan is in place.
‘Every one of those nights increases the risk of deconditioning and it is not the right place for people to be if they don’t need to be, not to mention the fact that of course it’s upsetting to be away from your familiar surroundings.
‘Urgent community response teams are crucial to our vision for urgent emergency care.’
Her disclosure revealed that 12,000 people had been helped by the Rutland and Leicestershire schemes during various stages of their illness.
‘We really want to bring the benefits of this unique mix of skills to more patients,’ she said. ‘We recently launched a 100-day challenge to try to make sure that teams get as many appropriate cases referred directly from 999 and 111 as possible, so that they’re able to help more patients in their homes and free up ambulance crews for more urgent jobs.’
The chief executive said services with established urgent care responses were able to ask ‘What’s next?’, adding: ‘The core of that service is bringing together people with complementary, but different, skills so that the person who needs support, whatever that happens to be, gets it through a one-stop shop model.
‘That could be about equipment being provided on the day, it could be about a handyman going around during the day, it could be about a whole package of support being put in within 12 hours.’
She made these comments as Liberal Democrats called on the military to assist struggling ambulance services in winter.
The party asked a parliamentary question and found that all ten English ambulance trusts were on the alert at their highest levels last month.
Liberal Democrat health spokesman Daisy Cooper said: ‘We’re talking about loved ones waiting for ambulances that arrive too late or get stuck in queues at hospitals with devastating results. The Prime Minister must get a grip on this crisis.’
- According to a large study, people who have had two doses of Covid vaccine are more likely than those who received the first. The study shows that protection begins to decline after three months. This highlights the need for boosters. The study was based on 83,000 Israeli adults – six months after their second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. Yesterday’s data included another 43,676 Covid-related deaths and 149 additional cases. The number of hospital admissions has fallen 12 percent in the last week, to 7,874 patients