Clause 1 - Meaning of ''NHS body'' and ''qualifying hospital patient''
Community Care (Delayed Discharges etc.) Bill
10:32 am
Ms Jacqui Smith (Minister of State, Department of Health; Redditch, Labour)
It is important to outline the role that we see for incentives in the Bill. Incentives must be put in the right place to ensure that patients do not have to wait for services, and are not trapped in hospital—because the system is slow, or because the NHS and social services are arguing about which services are needed—when they would be most appropriately served out of hospital. In some cases, the poor funding experienced by many social services departments in the years preceding 1997 meant that social services had an incentive to slow down the system to protect their budgets. As I outlined on Second Reading, we have made progress on tackling delayed discharge not only through investment but through top-down performance management.
However, performance is still patchy, and the Bill will enable us to put in place a new approach, which will work at a local level.
The hon. Member for West Chelmsford (Mr. Burns) accuses the Bill of centralising arrangements, but it does precisely the opposite: it puts in place the necessary incentives at local level to ensure that the significant extra investment that the Government are putting into social services is spent on the community alternatives necessary to ensure that older people are given the choices that they need and the opportunity to leave hospital at the appropriate time.