Lack of care staff contributing to bed blocking in Denbighshire

At a special council meeting, councillors discussed a report self-assessing the council’s performance in 2021-22.

The report included summaries of the council’s ‘workforce planning’ and the consequences of COVID-19 and heightened challenges in recruitment and retention of council staff.

Bed blocking often occurs when older or vulnerable people are ready to leave hospital but can’t be due to care not being available on their release.

Rhuddlan councillor Ann Davies said the authority needed to do more to recruit carers to ease the burden on unpaid carers and hospital wards suffering due to bed blocking.

“You did mention unpaid carers and how many we had in the county,” said Cllr Davies, addressing council officers.

“This comes up all the time, and I’m wondering now if you could elaborate on exactly what is being done to recruit carers and take the pressure off these unpaid carers in their community and more importantly free up beds in Ysbyty Glan Clwyd?”

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Cllr Davies also claimed patients were being kept in ambulances for hours due to a lack of hospital beds.

“It is a very, very serious situation at the moment,” she said.

“Even in this heat, the ambulances are having to keep patients in the ambulance for up to seven hours. There are no beds because they are being blocked by people who can’t care in the community. Now this is very serious. As a county, we should be prioritising this because if it’s going to be like this in the summer, what is it going to be like in the winter months?”

Nicola Kneale is a senior officer at Denbighshire and admitted there were pressures.

“In terms of recruitment, pressures are being faced by all services, but obviously with recruitment for health and social care staff, recruitment challenges can particularly put some of our statutory services at risk,” she said.

“I don’t think we are yet at that point, but there are pressures, and I know that a project team was established a few months ago to look at how we could encourage people to come forward as carers, so there have been some job fairs put on, for example. There has been really close working with Denbighshire, contact with local schools and colleges, and promotion of trying to promote health and social care as a career because some of the challenges being faced are short-term, but we also want to plan for the long-term to prevent such scenarios occurring in the future.”

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The report being discussed is a statutory document required by Welsh Government for auditing and had already been considered by the council’s scrutiny committee, which advised the authority should promote active travel and reduce plastics, its carbon output and deprivation.

Contained within the report is a list of corporate ambitions, including having fewer people in residential care and more people living in their own homes for longer with the required support.

Denbighshire’s chief executive Graham Boase said the council was doing all it could to improve the situation and fill vacant posts.

“It’s difficult because of the competition that is out there, the lack of people to do the job, so it’s not the lack of trying,” he said.

“We have set up our own internal action group, which is led by our corporate director who is working with HR and a range of colleagues, looking at different ways in which we can try and retain our current social care workers and attract more into Denbighshire because we have a number of vacant posts that need to be filled, so we are working on that, giving it a great deal of attention. We are not alone, of course. It is actually an issue that is repeated across the country, so we are also working with colleagues in health and directors of social services across Wales and, indeed, beyond to try and find some solution to that particular problem.

“The issue of bed blocking isn’t quite so easy. A lot of research has been done recently on the issue of this bed blocking. There are people stuck in hospital because there is nowhere for them to go. There are a number of issues around that. I mean, if there were places for them to go, they would be going there. There are some issues around the appropriate care that can be provided, and nationally, Welsh Government are leading on this with the health authorities and the local authority to try and unblock a thousand beds nationally, and there is a number of work going on across Wales on that, and we are obviously playing our part.”

He added: “But, of course, the general management of the ambulance service and health authority is not in our domain. We don’t manage that and is for others, but we do work closely with them and have a number of good strong relationships where we are trying to work across the piste, and, of course, this is the panacea around health and social care, working more closely together.

“It has been something we’ve been working on together for a long time nationally, and we will continue to do so to try and iron out those areas that need improvement because clearly, across the piste, there is more that we can all do to improve the circumstances that Cllr Ann Davies has described. I can assure members it is not for the lack of trying, and it is not for the lack of effort. We are working to try and find solutions to those problems.”

Councillors voted to back the report.