Jeremy Miles MS, Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care and Dawn Bowden MS, Minister for Children and Social Care
On 11 November 2024, we launched the 50 Day Integrated Care Winter Challenge to help speed up hospital discharge, help more people be cared for in their local community and improve collaboration between the NHS and local authorities.
The challenge provided health and social care partners with 50 days to review and evaluate their systems against 10 best practice interventions and to make necessary improvements. While some of these interventions will take longer to fully implement, each part of Wales will have a clear understanding of their performance and a shared action plan by the end of the challenge.
To support this work, we provided £19m to enhancing care plans for the most vulnerable population to help them stay well at home; increase the capacity of reablement and domiciliary care services to support timely hospital discharges and avoid hospital admission. The funding will also provide transitional step-down care for people with complex needs.
This 50-day challenge has helped to focus efforts and solidify working relationships across the health and social care system. The initial results are encouraging.
November saw the third successive monthly reduction in delays. We expect this to continue into December, establishing a downward trend since April 2024 and highlighting the positive impact of the 50-Day Winter Challenge.
The 50-day challenge was targeted towards supporting the people who experience the longest discharge delays to leave hospitals. An initial 395 people were identified – of these 225 (57%) people had been discharged by the end of December and of those still in hospital, 170 (80.5%) have agreed discharge plans in place to return home or to a place of care.
Another important aspect of the 50-day challenge was to accelerate the provision of community-based care for people with complex needs or those living with frailty, as a safe alternative to a hospital admission. A small reduction – 5% in November and 6% in December – in emergency admissions of people aged 70 and over was achieved during the challenge period compared to 2023.
The 50-day challenge has shown some positive green shoots of improvement in health and social care system flow. It has also shone a light on where targeted work, focus and improvements are needed the most, at a national level or regionally. We have been clear in our NHS planning framework for 2025-26 that health boards must continue to work with social care partners to deliver the 10 actions in the 50-day challenge as standard. We will be closely monitoring progress across Wales between now and the end of March to see how these improvements can be further embedded and sustained for the longer term.