Fear for elderly over lost beds

A FRAIL elderly woman from the Henley area had to take two buses and travel for more than 90 minutes in order to see her husband in hospital.

In another case a patient was sent home from hospital during the covid-19 pandemic without any support except for one phone call from a social worker in two weeks.

These are just two examples given by GPs of what they fear will happen again when seven hospital beds in Henley are axed.

One of the short stay beds at the Chilterns Court care centre, next to Townlands Memorial Hospital, has already closed and the other six will go at the end of the year, as the Henley Standard exclusively revealed last month.

The beds are used mainly for patients recovering from problems such as hip or shoulder operations who had been living independently.

But the Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire West Integrated Care Board and Oxfordshire County Council have withdrawn funding for them in order for more people to be cared for at home.

They say Oxfordshire needs to meet a national requirement of 95 per cent of people being discharged from acute hospital beds going home to live independently or with support.

This means patients in Henley will have to travel to Abingdon or Didcot for the nearest rehabilitation beds.

Alternatively, they may be kept in hospital longer after treatment, which could prevent new patients being admitted, or be discharged when previously deemed too unwell to go home.

GPs at the Bell and Hart Surgeries in Henley, which provide medical cover for the beds on a rota basis, were not consulted about the changes and say that the beds are occupied almost full-time.

One GP said: “During the covid pandemic the seven short stay hub beds were supplemented by four discharge-to-assess beds, bringing them to a total of 11. I had great concern about the discharge-to-assess model and at the time escalated this to the senior social worker in the hub team. One patient was discharged and had no social care or therapy input for more than two weeks and then had one call from a social worker. Then several weeks passed before any further action took place.”

Campaigners who want the beds retained have been told by health chiefs that there were 90 patient admissions from April last year to the end of August and that 63 of those would have subsequently gone home. They also said that many patients, about a third of whom were not from Henley, could have gone straight home rather than to Chilterns Court.

The care board and council said that of the 58 patients discharged from the Royal Berkshire Hospital in since August, four had been assessed as needing a short stay bed and just two were placed at Chilterns Court.

But the GP said: “I have asked several questions which have not been answered and am waiting for a response, though I suspect I will not get one in writing.

“I would also add that their analysis is flawed. In Henley we are near the edge of the RG9 postcode — we have many Bell Surgery patients in Hambleden and beyond in an SL postcode and not too far north it moves to an OX postcode.

“A case in point of what is happening — I have a patient who, rather than being discharged to Chilterns Court, went to Didcot. His wife, who is also frail, had to take two buses totalling one hour and 36 minutes to get to see him. This is not a local alternative for our community.

“There was a webinar discussing ‘integrated care networks’, a subdivision of integrated care boards, which would cover either all of South Oxfordshire or just south-east Oxfordshire, managing patients between hospital and the community.

“We were encouraged to shape these networks but this seems disingenuous given the lack of consultation about Chilterns Court.” The GP admitted to being at a “bit of a loss” as to what could be done but was “heartened” to know that the Townlands Steering Group had been reformed in order to campaign to keep the beds.

Retired GP Peter Ashby, who is a member of the group, called the decision to close the beds “nonsense”.

He said: “Obviously it was a big shock and a surprise to everyone, particularly as it appeared that decision had already been made, without any consultation, which is not very helpful.

“It is disappointing that our MP is happy with the decision and didn’t pick up on it and come to us. It is very sad that things have been run this way.

“The decision itself is a bit of a nonsense. There has been a big paper in the British Medical Journal where a consultant said what hospitals desperately need is beds, to get people out of acute beds and into recovery beds so they can admit more people.

“There was something put out by the Department of Health, saying they need more beds but only in Oxfordshire has it been decided that we don’t need beds. The way they have picked on the Townlands site beds is like someone has put a pin in a board and said ‘We need to take 10 beds so let’s take those seven so we only need to find three more’.

“They were asked to provide their workings and have failed to provide them. If it is justified and there is a perfectly good reason then we can’t argue with that but the feeling is Henley is being picked on and we’re thinking, ‘Here we go again’. I am not amused.”

The care board and county council have said that for patients needing a short stay bed in future one will be identified as close to their home as possible.

They said: “The decision to reduce the amount of short stay hub beds is in line with national guidance. While we recognise that improvements can be made in how we communicated these decisions with local partners, we are confident that the strategy will bring about better outcomes.”