The number of patients having to wait longer than the target time to be discharged from hospital is beginning to drop with the integration of health and social care, according to the Health Secretary.
Shona Robison said evidence on the ground indicates progress is being made to combat the problem of delayed discharges, also known as bed blocking.
She was speaking at Holyrood after announcing an extra £200 million over two years to support the 32 local NHS and social care partnerships set up as part of the move towards integrated services.
Partnerships have to set out their plans to merge health and local authority care services by April 1 and will then have a year to fully implement them.
Current targets for delayed discharges state nobody should wait more than four weeks from when they are clinically ready to be discharged, with that target set to come down to two weeks in April.
Ms Robison said two-thirds of health and social care partnerships are likely to meet that target next month.
She said: “Nationally we are now moving into implementation and in a couple of weeks’ time the first of our new integrated partnerships for health and social care will go live.
“Already from around the country we can see examples of local commitment to improvement through integration, such as Glasgow’s ambitious programme to reduce delayed discharge and improve intermediate care.
“It’s not just Glasgow, across the country partnerships have started to behave as if they were already integrated.
“Local information tells us that delayed discharges are starting to come down, two-thirds of partnerships looked well placed to deliver the two-week target at April.”
Ms Robison added: “One patient delayed is one too many. I want to eradicate this problem. For those people who are delayed we’re providing the worst possible outcome at the highest possible cost.”
She told MSPs that 2% of the population currently account for 50% of hospital and prescribing resource use in Scotland.
“That’s a huge opportunity for the partnerships to get and identify their 2% of the population and importantly to do something about better supporting them,” she said.
Labour health spokeswoman Jenny Marra welcomed the progress made but said there was still a long way to go and warned of “nervousness” about the integration of budgets.
She said: “When you have one budget struggling to deliver a service and another budget under constraints too, pulling them together does not automatically deliver the results we would want.
“Unless we properly resource our hard-working NHS staff and care workers with what they need, we will continue to see a log jam in the system and patient care will continue to be impacted.
“The boards integration on April 1 is only a starting point to this but I think a biggest step in the right direction would be a proper resourcing of care workers so we can move to a point where all care workers across the country are earning the living wage and there are more of them to deliver the care that we need.”
Conservative MSP Nanette Milne said: “Without integration it is hard to imagine how the complex needs of an ageing and increasingly frail elderly population can be met, and the aspiration achieved of people living good lives, as healthy as possible, in their local communities for as long as possible, reducing the need for unplanned hospital admissions, and hence relieving the pressures on our emergency services.”
She added: “It is clear that there is still a considerable way to go to achieve the necessary integration between all the health and social care services that is required to cater for the increasing demands of demographic change.”
Liberal Democrat Jim Hume said: “Integrating health and social care is no small task… but it is of course very welcome.
“The challenges must be acknowledged by the Government for it to be successful, and we need the Government to give professionals the support they need to allow them to give their patients the best care.
“There are nearly 170,000 bed days lost to boarding, this ticking timebomb can’t be allowed to continue.”