Resilience committee holds further meeting
The Scottish Government’s resilience committee (SGoRR) met again yesterday to discuss the challenges facing health and social care this winter.
Chaired by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, the meeting focussed on hospital occupancy, and the measures being taken to reduce levels of delayed discharge and find care placements and packages for those clinically fit to leave hospital.
The most recent A&E statistics have shown a continued improvement in performance, with 70.1% of people being admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours – the best performance since May.
Additional funding has also been made available Health and Social Care Partnerships who have the responsibility of providing care packages for those in their locality, to provide 300 interim care home beds for people who no longer need to be in hospital. So far, 162 people have entered interim care facilities paid for using this additional funding.
The SGoRR meeting was also attended by the Health Secretary, other cabinet ministers, the Chief Medical Officer and senior representatives from NHS boards, COSLA, Integration Joint Boards and the Scottish Ambulance Service.
The First Minister said: “The continued improvement in A&E performance is something to be welcomed, but there is still much work being done on safely freeing up hospital capacity and easing pressures elsewhere in the system. That is why we are continuing to pursue a range of measures to enable people to leave hospital as soon as possible when it is clinically safe for them to do so.
“We remain indebted to the health and social care staff in all parts of Scotland who have continued to do an outstanding job, despite the extra challenges that winter has presented.”
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