The HSJ reports that the Royal College of Physicians has described NHSE’s target of creating an additional 10,000 virtual ward beds by the end of September as “not helpful”, suggesting it is increasingly being rolled out to low risk patients who do not require hospital care.
The college said the technology should be prioritised to support patients at home who otherwise would have required hospital care.
The RCP has also joined representative bodies for emergency and acute clinicians in criticising another key policy being encouraged by NHSE, to create acute respiratory infection hubs.
Both virtual wards and acute respiratory hubs are included in NHSE’s 10 “high impact interventions’’ which it is asking systems to have in place ahead of winter.
RCP clinical vice president John Dean said: “The risk [with virtual wards] is that we will be using technology with patients with lower levels of acuity that would not otherwise have been in hospital.
“So we are diverting our resources and our time and our monitoring to lower levels [of] risks of patient. Those may be counted as patients in virtual ward beds, but actually we are over monitoring patients that we may previously not have monitored.
“There is a need for increased community care for a number of patients who remain at home. But we mustn’t be over treating and over monitoring patients who would not otherwise have been in hospital in order to count the numbers and fill NHS targets. The 10,000 virtual beds is not a helpful target, because we’re focused on counting, not in delivering hospital level care at home.”
Full story in the HSJ, 8 August 2023