Michael Yoakley's Charity: partnership innovation award runner-up

Manager Julie Wickenden shows off one of the hospital avoidance beds, which helps prevent inappropriate hospital admissions. Photograph: Michael Yoakley's Charity

A care home in Kent is helping to free up hospital beds and preventing older people being inappropriately admitted to hospital, following a partnership with a local GP surgery.

The Michael Yoakley's Charity in Margate provides the North Down surgery with two short-term hospital avoidance beds, which are offered to older patients who are unable to be cared for at home and need support.

The patients spend a maximum of seven days in the home at a charge of £500 a week, which is significantly cheaper than the £500-a-day it would cost to pay for a high-dependency NHS hospital bed. So far this year the home has looked after 24 older people who have been recovering from common infections and viruses, including chicken pox.

The charity's executive manager Julie Wickenden says the scheme turns on its head the traditional relationship between the home and GPs, where family doctors have traditionally served the needs of the home.

"We have a large local hospital where we have many elderly people clogging the system when they don't need to be there," she says. "Our seaside area also has a high proportion of elderly residents many of whom are geographically distanced from their family members who might otherwise care for them, so the default when they are unwell, or even just vulnerable, is a hospital admission.

"A lot of care homes are looking to develop different kinds of initiatives because they are not having so much success with social services funding as the councils are really holding back putting people into residential care, so we have had to look for other ways of making up the finances."

The initiative, which allows continuity of care by the patient's own GP, has been so successful that the home is now in the process of building an extension, so that it can provide more hospital-avoidance beds.

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