The case for home-based intermediate care

Getting people home from hospital or helping them maintain their independence in their own home for longer are long-held policy goals; they also underpin the Better Care Fund policy and support programme, as well as the Local Government Association’s integration vision.

Our Better Care Fund Support Programme has commissioned this publication to articulate the benefits, challenges, and opportunities of delivering home-based intermediate care (HBIC) by using evidence and learning from 19 health and care systems. In doing so, the document considers how HBIC can be one of the most valuable investments systems can make to achieve those goals, and thus improve people’s outcomes and staff wellbeing, transform operational performance, and reduce spend.

There is also a financial imperative for improvement of HBIC. This publication shows that, when summed across all systems in England, improvement of HBIC could produce a £3.4bn a year reduction in long-term care spend (compared with a £15.3bn per year annual spend on adults’ long-term packages and an approx. £27.8bn per year spend on hospital beds). 

There is a further saving implication on acute and community hospital and long-term care budgets when the cost impact of delayed discharges (and therefore increased deconditioning) due to lack of HBIC capacity is also considered.

Read the full report below. Please note, a fully accessible version of this report will follow shortly.