Use spare care home beds to reduce NHS waiting lists
The problem of bed blocking in hospitals can be reduced by the NHS using spare beds in Care Quality Commission registered care homes, says Dr Sanjeev Kanoria, a former NHS surgeon. The government's decision to halt the construction of new hospitals will exacerbate the crisis, despite there being a straightforward solution.
Vulnerable older patients not requiring acute hospital treatment but unable to be discharged has resulted in almost 8m people waiting for hospital admission and treatment. Increased waiting times for medical care, increases sickness days and damages national productivity. Currently, 14,000 NHS beds are blocked - 60% of these are people who cannot be discharged to their homes due to lack of care staff and support. Adding another 14,000 beds to the NHS could take over five years. With the government now withdrawing the building of 40 hospitals, the situation is going to only worsen. Where will the beds come from to look after sick patients? Will they continued to be looked after in corridors?
Many CQC registered care homes currently have spare units and beds. These could be used by hospitals, particularly where those care homes that have multiple independent units co-located on the same site, like Advinia.
Care home provider Advinia has run a pilot to create a seamless discharge unit with Manchester University Hospital. The hospital rents 23 beds in a separate unit at Advinia’s care home, Gorton Parks in Manchester. The hospital pays a fixed fee per bed per week and Advinia provides cleaning services, food and maintenance. The hospital staffs the unit with its own nurses and pays for any capital expenditure needed and provides management oversight. Instead of requiring one trained nurse per four patients as in an acute hospital ward, the unit is staffed with one trained nurse for 8-10 patients - most of these patients require limited nursing care and hospital beds are freed to look after sick patients without wasting a single day and a cost of £1000 per day.
In January 2025, Bolton Health Authority also took a unit in an Advinia multi-unit site in Bolton, helping them manage their waiting list.
The estimated full costs including hidden costs of a blocked NHS bed in England is more than £1,000 per day or £7000 per week. Using seamless discharge units the total cost to the NHS can come down to £350 per day or £2450 per week, and free up hospital beds and reduce waiting times. To help the government and country, Dr Sanjeev Kanoria the chairman and founder of Advinia health care, who worked in the NHS as a liver transplant surgeon for 25 years, is willing to supply these units at £140 per day per bed which is only £980 per week.
Seamless discharge units at care homes have multiple benefits
- Acute care bed is free, reducing waiting times – a 25-bed unit can permit approx. 4500 procedures to be done per year. This will reduce sickness days and increase UK productivity
- Hospital nursing staff can be utilised in a more efficient staffing ratio - care homes have difficulty in recruiting nurses, because they are competing with hospitals and many care units have been shut down due to lack of nursing staff
- Facilities are CQC registered for care and they are fully insured
- Amenities such as laundry, cleaning and food are provided
- Patients receive care directly from hospital staff, in a unit outside hospital, maintaining continuity of care
- Saves vulnerable patients waiting for discharge from hospital infections and repeat admission
- Onsite hospital staff work with the patient, family, and hospital to plan the patient's eventual discharge from the care unit
- Hospital clinical staff are freed to see inpatients
Advinia can immediately provide circa. 1000 beds throughout England and Scotland, which would enable almost 500,000 procedures to be performed in NHS hospitals in one year, helping solve the short-term problem of building acute hospital beds. Other care home providers also have spare capacity.
Dr Sanjeev Kanoria, chairman and founder of Advinia, said: ‘Like many care home operators we mothballed beds during the pandemic. With our separate 25-30 bed units on large sites, we can provide these fully equipped, certified beds now, to the NHS for low cost where the NHS directly operates them as hospital discharge beds, which would go a long way to reducing NHS waiting lists. We’ve already shown it works in Manchester and recently Bolton, where the NHS have taken up these units and are operating them directly, with support services from Advinia.’
PoliticsHome Newsletters
Get the inside track on what MPs and Peers are talking about. Sign up to The House's morning email for the latest insight and reaction from Parliamentarians, policy-makers and organisations.
