Birmingham: Funding of over £6 million is to be handed to care providers to help support people being discharged from hospital.
The money will allow providers to support and boost their own workforce by helping with childcare costs, paying overtime, recruiting extra staff and other measures. The funding includes a significant share from Birmingham and Solihull Integrated Care Board.
The city council’s cabinet today, 17 January, formally accepted the £6.04m Adult Social Care Discharge Fund grant from government, to be distributed between now and the end of March.
The money will go to eligible adult social care providers – care homes, home support, supported living and extra care schemes – to enable them to boost workforce capacity.
The fund is discretionary and can be used on measures such as, though not limited to:
- activities to support hospital discharge or to prevent or address delays as a result of workforce capacity shortages
- supporting payments to boost the hours provided by the existing workforce – including childcare costs and overtime payments
- the creation and maintenance of measures to secure additional or redeployed capacity from current care workers. For example, staff banks and redeploying staff
- local recruitment initiatives
- bringing forward planned pay increases
Cllr Mariam Khan, Cabinet Member for Health and Social Care, said: “This is a welcome boost for our care providers who are working extremely hard to support residents leaving hospital who still need a degree of care.
“It is right that there is flexibility in terms of how the money can be spent as there will be varying needs according to each provider – some will need extra staff while others need to be able to free up existing staff by helping with childcare.
“However, it is important to emphasise that we can’t keep having these short-term fixes, no matter how welcome they are; social care need to be treated as the vital public service it is with funding and structure to match.”
