Health and social care: winter overview 2021 to 2022

Financial and Digital Enablers

Aims

• Support the provision of the right care, in the right place, at the right time, by providing solutions such as NHS Inform to support self-management, reducing late and avoidable A&E presentations and delayed discharge.
• Provide the public with greater choice over how they access appointments through digital solutions, meaning patients can be treated from home where appropriate, thus maximising capacity and improving outcomes.
• Increased service resilience over the winter months to ensure patients can access appropriate medical advice and treatment remotely 24/7 through services such as nhsinform.scot and NHS24.
• Enhanced communications between multi-disciplinary teams (MDT’s) using digital and mobile services to provide high quality, integrated care to patients.
• Use financial support effectively to maximise capacity in our hospitals and primary care, reduce delayed discharges, improve pay for social care staff, and ensure those in the community who need support receive effective and responsive care.

How We Will Deliver This

• The actions set out in this document are supported by a package of over £300 million additional funding in 2021-22.
• We are building in on the successful adoption, and will continue to support Territorial Health Boards to adopt self-monitoring approaches for a range of conditions such as hypertension, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and COVID-19.
• Building on our Programme for Government commitment, we will continue to roll out Near Me video consulting into our care homes and wider social care, facilitating Near Me social work reviews, duty social work and out of hours early adopters as appropriate.
• We will support telecare providers with new guidance to support contingency planning for services over the winter period. This will include supporting proactive telecare, remote working where appropriate and contingency when weather or the pandemic are disrupting installation and responder services.
• We will build upon the success of our digital connectivity in care home programme which invested £1.2 million to provide devices across care homes. We will continue to provide connectivity support and data packages for devices for a further year and we will extend the digital training and leadership package available to residents and professionals.