Navigating the health and care system can be complicated and confusing. People tell us that they want to experience joined-up care, whichever organisation or team is caring for them. They want services that are well-coordinated so that they only need to tell their story once and they want to get help at an early stage to avoid a crisis at a later time.
Being joined-up also means that we can be more efficient by working together to ensure we are all clear what a person needs, reducing the number of different staff involved in looking after someone, better co-ordinating care and treatment appointments and ensuring that we don’t duplicate work or indeed miss things through poor co-ordination.
For many years across Devon we have been investing in enhancing our community health and social care teams. Clinicians with a huge range of skills and expertise are helping people maintain their health and independence, primarily in their own homes.
Our teams provide rehabilitation, nursing and social care support. They work with patients, carers and families to prevent admissions and get people home from hospital more quickly. This is because – for the majority – patients recover their independence and rehabilitate far better when in their own home, in familiar surroundings.
Devon’s NHS is financially challenged and whilst our first priority is always to provide high quality and compassionate care, we have a duty to do this within the available budget. To enable us to continue delivering high quality care within our budget we need to shift our resources from hospital beds to the care surrounding patients in their own homes.
*This is based on a daily £174/bed nursing cost in Eastern Devon. This gives an annual nursing cost of £914K for a 16 bed site. Rounded down to £900k or £75K per month