Intermediate Care

Weekly returns are collected from Intermediate care providers through the Intermediate Care Data Collection which was introduced on 29th July 2024 and replaces the Community Discharge Sitrep. Amendments have been introduced to ensure alignment with the intermediate care framework, published in October 2023.

Intermediate care is a collective term for short-term interventions that aim to maximise people’s independence and quality of life following or during a period of illness. It includes ‘step-down’ services after discharge from an episode of acute care to support recovery, and ‘step-up’ services to avoid admission to hospital. Intermediate care commonly involves rehabilitation, reablement and recovery support and can be provided in a person’s home or in a community bedded setting.

The changes will improve the collection to report on numbers of patients received into services, access to rehabilitation and reablement, and length of stay in services, improving the insight available to systems, regions and nationally that supports demand and capacity planning and service improvements.

The intermediate care data collection has comparable data with the community discharge sitrep for criteria to reside and discharge pathways. However, the data for additional bed days and delay reasons is now for all patients, regardless of their length of stay, meaning that comparisons to the data from the community discharge sitrep for patients with an overall length of stay of 14+ days and 21+ days is not possible.

Background and scope

Data are shown at national, regional, system and provider organisation level. The published monthly data include:

  • Daily numbers of patients:
    • Who no longer meet the requirements to remain (criteria to reside);
    • Who were discharged;
    • Not discharged by the end of the day despite no longer meeting the requirements to remain (criteria to reside).
  • A weekly average snapshot number of additional days in total patients have remained in hospital since the criteria to be discharged decision was made
  • Weekly snapshot average of the total number of people per day  who no longer meet the criteria to reside but were not discharged, broken down by the reasons why they continued to reside
  • Month total number of patients discharged by their intended discharge destination

The intermediate care data collection collects data for all inpatients 18 and over in NHS and/or jointly commissioned non-specialist community bedded services for the purposes of rehabilitation, reablement and recovery, including those funded through the Better Care Fund (BCF). This includes all NHS and jointly commissioned community beds that could be provided by, for example:

  • community trusts
  • community interest companies (CIC) and other providers of rehabilitation, reablement and recovery services within community bedded services
  • acute trusts that also provide community services (reporting only their community hospital beds in this data collection)
  • mental health trusts that also provide community services (reporting only their community hospital beds in this data collection)
  • care homes where rehabilitation, reablement and recovery services are provided

Block contract and spot purchase beds are included in the above categories.

The scope of this data collection includes all NHS, jointly commissioned and BCF-funded beds used for intermediate care purposes. Rehabilitation, reablement and recovery beds provided through specialised commissioning services should be excluded.

Other collections

Discharge delays (acute)

(Discontinued) Discharge delays (community)

Weekly timeseries acute discharge delays data for the 2022/23 winter period

Please note the discharge delays (acute) monthly publication and weekly acute discharge delays timeseries figures are likely to differ as monthly publications data can be revised prior to publication where as weekly publications data do not undergo a revisions process.

Delayed Transfer of Care (DTOC) page contains information relating to delays

The DTOC metric is no longer being collected and publication has therefore ceased. The last publication of these data was for delays occurring in February 2020, published on 9th April 2020. The DTOC data is not comparable with community discharge delays data published on this page but does offer historic data on patients and days delayed at provider organisation level.

Data

Monthly Publication

Monthly Timeseries from October 2022 onwards

The weekly timeseries starts from w/c 29th July due to changes in the weekly questions that are not comparable with the previous weekly questions in the community discharge sitrep.

Notes:

Pre-release access list

Contact

For further information about the published statistics, please contact us at: england.nhsdata@nhs.net