Recruitment points, industrial motion and the tip of ring-fenced nationwide funding have contributed to a minimize in digital ward mattress capability, NHS North West London Built-in Care Board (ICB) advised Digital Well being Information.
In Could 2024, NHS England introduced proposals to extend entry to digital wards in a bid to chop avoidable hospital admissions and cut back emergency division ready instances.
Nonetheless, the digital ward provision figures for Could 2024 printed by NHS England, present that 9 of the 42 ICBs in England have diminished their digital ward mattress capability since December 2023.
The variety of sufferers in a digital ward at North West London ICB elevated 5.6% from 300 in December 2023 to 317 in Could 2024.
Nonetheless the variety of digital ward beds accessible on the ICB has been minimize from 588 in December 2023 to 431 in Could 2024, representing a 27% lower.
It is a drop from a capability of 24.6 ‘beds’ per 100,000 GP registered inhabitants to fifteen ‘beds’ per 100,000 GP.
The NHSE longer-term ambition, outlined within the ‘2023/24 priorities and operational planning steering‘, is to achieve 40-50 digital ward ‘beds’ per 100,000 folks.
Ring-fenced nationwide funding for digital wards got here to an finish in March 2024, with digital ward providers now having to be drawn from wider pressing and emergency care funding.
The NHSE supporting data for ICS leads, ‘Enablers for achievement: digital wards together with hospital at dwellings‘, printed on 24 April 2022, says: “No ringfenced recurrent funding will likely be made accessible from 2024/25. Techniques will subsequently want to make sure digital wards are constructed into long run methods and expenditure plans”.
A spokesperson for the North West London ICB advised Digital Well being Information: “The ICB carried out a evaluate of accessible digital ward capability initially of 2024 and revised our digital ward mattress capability to 431″.
They added that the minimize had been resulting from “a number of elements, notably to do with recruitment and the affect of commercial motion“.
They stated capability ranges had additionally been affected by the method of procurement, altering digital supplier and “the cessation of ring-fenced funding in March 2024”.
NHSE advised Digital Well being Information that ring-fenced service growth funding had supported the speedy growth of digital wards throughout ICBs, however added that funding continues to be accessible to assist digital ward growth.
“Digital wards proceed to be an vital precedence in delivering care nearer to dwelling, stopping pointless hospital admissions, and lowering the time sufferers have to spend in hospital, and funding has been made accessible to all ICBs to assist digital ward growth as a part of the £1bn UEC restoration fund in 2023/2024 and 2024/2025,” the spokesperson stated.
“Our world-leading digital wards programme has allowed a whole bunch of hundreds of sufferers to obtain hospital-level care from the consolation of their houses, and we’ve widened their scope to incorporate a variety of well being situations together with sicknesses related to frailty, coronary heart failure, acute respiratory infections and paediatrics,” they added.
In the meantime, College Hospitals Plymouth NHS Belief’s digital ward beds at the moment are greater than 80% occupied with plans to develop additional, in response to its Could 2024 board papers.
A current evaluation by NHSE additionally discovered that black and ethnic minority persons are underrepresented in digital ward affected person cohorts.