More South Lanarkshire residents will soon benefit from an expansion of innovative services that provide greater community-based care – and which will help reduce unnecessary hospital stays.

Members of South Lanarkshire Integration Joint Board (IJB) yesterday have showed their support for increasing capacity with immediate effect of its ‘life changing’ Home First programme.

The programme is part of the Discharge Without Delay programme, that looks to care for people at home whenever possible, prevent avoidable admissions to hospital and, where hospital admission is necessary, support timely discharge.

The Home First programme in South Lanarkshire has already enabled 90 people to be assessed and supported in their own home in the last six months and is now set to receive £5.428m in additional funding.

This significant investment will be used primarily, according to the programme director Marianne Hayward, to recruit more health and care staff to the local community workforce.

IJB papers show recruitment to care at home posts is still proving to be national challenge.

Soumen Sengupta, chief officer for South Lanarkshire HSCP, says the Home First programme will play a key role in service transformation and providing better outcomes:

“Delivering the right care, at the right time and in the right place is fundamental to improving the care and wellbeing of our local communities. That’s the core of our Home First ethos.”

“In our plans for the future, we’ve been clear about our commitment to transform services to deliver better outcomes for local people. Home First very much embodies this sentiment in action. Benefits are being reaped by being bold and embracing more progressive ways of working.”

Before the pandemic, South Lanarkshire had some of the worst delayed discharge figures in Scotland.

However, with the roll out of Discharge without Delay and Home First, the Partnership is anticipating a reduction in delayed discharge bed days of at least 10% on 2019/20 numbers.

Lesley McDonald, chair of South Lanarkshire IJB, says the programme can better meet patients needs:

“Home First is based on compassion and coordinating care around the individual’s needs. And quite often that’s about simple things that can make a significant difference.

“For example, assessing a person in their own familiar environment, as opposed to a clinical setting, can be less stressful for them. In turn, that enables staff to gather a much more accurate picture of a person’s needs. This is crucially important to ensuring the right package of care is set out, whilst supporting independence.”

The roll out of Home First will be supported by multi-agency teams, including occupational therapists, physiotherapists, social work and clinical assistants and registered nurses, working in and out of Lanarkshire's hospitals.

Currently the teams solely work out of Hairmyres Hospital to those residing in East Kilbride, but phase 2 will expand home assessment teams to Hamilton, Cambuslang, Rutherglen and Clydesdale.

A monitoring framework to track the benefits of the programme is in development.

Read more: Third of carers feel unsupported, survey shows; Fuel price hike jeopardising homecare; More money for urgent care reform

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