SWINDON has seen the number of bed block delays slashed – with regular meetings between the council and NHS helping to get patients out of the wards.

Health chiefs said it was a remarkable transformation for a town that had previously been “placed on the naughty step” by government ministers for failing to get hospital bed block delays under control.

New figures show that in Swindon in January, the number of “delayed transfers of care” (DTOCs) - hospital bed days lost due to a lack of carers or care home places – was just one tenth of the south west average.

That month, each day the equivalent of less than two patients were left waiting in beds because of blockages in the social care system – overseen by the council. By comparison, across the region each day in January an average of 16.81 patients otherwise fit enough to be discharged from hospital were stuck on the wards.

Swindon delayed transfers of care attributable to NHS delays were also lower than the regional average.

At a meeting of the borough’s health and wellbeing board this week, managers said the good performance was a result of regular meetings between the council, Swindon Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) and Great Western Hospital aimed at identifying patients fit enough to get home.

Swindon Borough Council say that the meetings – which happen three times a week – have contributed to the number of “lost bed days” falling from 605 to 286 by mid-December.

As well as the regular meetings, a £1.4million funding boost from central government was invested in extra care home beds and improvements at the hospital’s emergency department to speed patients into beds or out the door.

Councillor Brian Ford, cabinet member for adult health and social care, thanked council staff, the CCG and GWH.

He added of the bed blocking figures: “This has gone from being what I would call substandard over the last couple of years – in fact we even had a letter come down from the ministers telling us what a lot of rubbish we were and how we had to get it right.

“We’ve got it right, but we’ve now got to keep it right.

“I used to go to south west regional lead members’ [meetings] and be one of the gang. I’m now hated, because we’re now not part of the gang and they wish they were part of our gang. It really has been an enormous transformation and it’s been done not by one single bullet – it’s been lots of different things.”

“It wasn’t that long ago we had a letter from the minister that put us on the naughty step,” added Swindon Borough Council chief executive John Gilbert. “It concentrated our minds.”

However, Mr Gilbert warned that more needed to “get the wider community system in place” to ensure that hospitals weren’t overwhelmed.

Following his point, Nicki Millin, accountable officer at Swindon CCG, said that there remained a “challenge” around so-called delayed transfers of care caused by “patient choice”.

“This will be where either the individual patients or their families decide that they believe the best place to stay is in a hospital bed while they find a care home of choice or they wait for someone to go on holiday,” she said.

Ms Millin told councillors: “We know that a hospital’s fine while you need treatment, but as soon as you’re fit enough it is better for you to be somewhere else to aid that recovery.”