Clause 4 - Liability to make delayed discharge payments
Community Care (Delayed Discharge etc.) Bill
6:00 pm
Ms Jacqui Smith (Minister of State, Department of Health; Redditch, Labour)
I was pretty nitty-gritty about the fact that ''until 11 o'clock the next day'' implies a discharge the day before, and so on, but I have a bit more nitty-gritty to go.
Amendment No. 75, tabled by the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam, seeks to ensure fairness for social services departments, particularly in relation to notification of discharge. As he said, we will all have heard stories of hospitals trying to clear their wards late in the afternoon, especially on a Friday, when it is not possible for social services to put services in place that day. The system of notification—of the need for services, which we discussed in relation to clause 2, and of the proposed discharge day, introduced in clause 3—go a long way in protecting social services from that sort of behaviour, as it ensures proper assessment of when someone will be discharged. We had already had the same thought as the hon. Gentleman. Under subsection (7)(c), regulations will provide for that. They will cover the day of the original notification of a needs assessment. It is our intention that any notification after 2 pm will count as notification on the next day to enable social services properly to start their assessment. We have provided for something similar in the Bill, so that notifications made after 5 pm will be deemed to have been made at 9 am the next morning.
We also need to remember that, under clause 3(8)(a), social services will have 24 hours from notification to put the services in place before the patient is delayed. Therefore, if notification that a patient is to be discharged were given after 5 pm, social services would have all the next day to put services in place. If no services were in place on the first day after that, that would count as the first day of delay, and so on until the services are made available. Therefore, the point raised in the amendment will be covered in our regulation-making powers.