There are currently 700 domiciliary care packages are currently outstanding in the Southern Trust area, which is having a direct impact on hospital admissions and discharges.
Acting chief executive of the Southern HSC Trust, Colm McCafferty said there are challenges providing community-based support to vulnerable adults.
“Challenges around there are hugely linked to patient – and indeed staff – experience, in Emergency Departments at the moment,” he told a Trust board meeting this week.
“Domiciliary care is hugely topical, but critical to what we seek to do in terms of alleviating delayed discharges, avoiding admissions in the first instance, but we don’t have sufficient capacity to meet demand.
“As of today, which has been a fairly consistent pattern, we have approximately 700 packages of outstanding domiciliary care, which means individuals who have been assessed as requiring domiciliary care, to either expedite a discharge from hospital, or indeed hopefully to keep them supported and well within the community.
“But that is also in the context that there are approximately 5,000 individuals who are receiving daily domiciliary care on an ongoing basis, and that is credit to our staff who seek to maintain that.
“We do have an ageing population, the metrics indicate that that will be a continued pattern, not just regionally, but specifically for the Southern Trust.
“And from a planning and commissioning perspective, that is something that we absolutely need to continue to plan for.
“But it inevitably points towards a need for additional investments, if we’re to meet that demand currently, but most certainly into the future, as our demographics indicate what is clearly going to be the pattern.”
