In June, Lord Carter’s Review of Operational Productivity in NHS Providers suggested that health trusts should focus on energy efficiency projects as a way to tackle estate costs.
In his latest plans, however, the Labour peer has gone further, arguing that hospitals could invest in care homes to help reduce the problem of delayed discharges of patients.
So-called bed-blocking has long been a problem for hospitals as they seek to improve efficiency, and Lord Carter’s suggestion that hospital trusts build their own care homes chimes with the NHS Five Year Forward View published last year, which calls for a major reconfiguration of the way in which different levels of care work together.