Sunderland health services to be given more than £1.5million to cope with winter pressures on NHS

More than £1.5million is to given to health services in Sunderland to cope with pressure on resources this winter.
Sunderland Royal Hospital.Sunderland Royal Hospital.
Sunderland Royal Hospital.

The city will receive £1,567,778 as part of a programme to help local authorities alleviate winter pressures on the NHS, with the Government arguing the cash will help to get patients home quicker and freeing up hospital beds across England.

The extra funding, part of a £240million fund announced by Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock earlier this month, is aimed at reducing delayed transfers of care and could pay for home care packages to help patients get out of hospital quicker, reablement packages which support workers to help patients carry out everyday tasks and regain mobility and confidence and home adaptations, including new facilities for personal care, such as adapting a shower room if a patient has limited movement

The North East will receive £13,817,755 in total.

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Councils have been allocated the funding based on the adult social care relative needs formula and letters have been sent out today to inform them.

Government health chiefs say that delays attributable to adult social care have been reduced by 39% across England since February last year.

Mr Hancock said: “I want to help the NHS through this winter.

“I have already provided funding for hospitals to make upgrades to their buildings to deal with pressures this winter, and I am making an extra £240 million available to councils to pay for social care packages this winter to support our NHS.

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“We will use this money to help people who don’t need to be in hospital, but do need care, to get back home, into their communities, so we can then free up those vital hospital beds, and help more people get the hospital care they need.”

The Government says that in September, the NHS received up to £145million for trusts across the county to boost winter resilience, money which will go toward upgrading wards, redeveloping A&E departments, and pay for an extra 900 beds.

And a total of £36.3million was awarded to ambulance trusts in June to prepare for this winter, and will go towards buying 256 new ambulances.

An additional £1.6billion has been given to the health service for 2018/19, money which it's said will be used by the NHS to treat a quarter of a million more patients in A&E and for improve A&E performance.

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For the first time, children in school year 5 will be offered the flu vaccine, meaning as a result, all children aged between 2 and 9 will be offered the flu vaccine.

Other actions being implemented to boost support over the winter period include:

ensuring extended access in primary care is in place across the country, with an additional nine million appointments per year

rolling out NHS 111 Online nationwide

taking action to safely reduce ambulances conveying patients to hospital through increased ‘hear and treat’ and ‘see and treat’

expanding the provision of ‘same day’ emergency care

setting an ambition to reduced long stays in hospital (over 21 days) by 25% to free up 4,000 beds