Guidance, tools and publications

Tools

• Top tips for implementing a collaborative commissioning approach to Home First
  
  These top tips seek to enable health and care systems to identify what they need to commission to enable people to remain living independently at home, avoiding unnecessary admissions to hospital and enabling a safe and timely discharge home after a hospital stay.

• Implementing a Home First approach to discharge from hospital
  
  LGA and ADASS have produced a short ‘top tips’ guide to safe, timely and appropriate discharge from hospital. It provides a short list of questions systems should be asking themselves to ensure they are putting individuals first by promoting a Home First and discharge to assess approach.

Publications

• Community health and care discharge and crisis care model: an investment in reablement
• People First, Manage What Matters: A report published by Newton Europe - commissioned by the Better Care Support Programme - highlights the challenges health and social care systems are facing to sustainably reduce delayed discharges, and the impact this is having on people’s lives, as well as system finances.
• Why Not Home, Why Not Today? Lessons from a study into the challenges of transfers of care.

National guidance

• The Care and Support Statutory Guidance (June 2017) provides councils with the information about how to meet the legal obligations placed on them by the Care Act and the regulations. It includes detailed information in relation to hospital discharge (see sections 15.37 to 15.45).
• Monthly Delayed Transfers of Care Situation reports: November 2018: guidance on counting delayed transfer, including the definitions of different reason codes
• NHS England delayed transfers of care data