Local charity helps older patients with quick hospital discharge

Possability People’s Link Back Service are working together with Health Watch on a new Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust (BSUH) initiative to contact and signpost patients to wellbeing services on discharge from hospital.

Older patients who are identified as vulnerable and needing extra support to access services will be referred through to Link Back, whose expert team will then support them for up to four months.

Within a few days of the service launching, it has supported seven people to receive:

  • welfare benefits advice
  • funding for emergency bedding and a mobile phone
  • shopping
  • support, and
  • befriending.

In addition, its Early Response Service continues to play a key role in enabling older patients who have complex needs to be discharged more quickly, by arranging and funding urgent housing repairs, deep cleans at home, appliances and emergency food parcels through Brighton and Hove City Council’s Hospital Discharge Grant.

Link Back’s Gwyn Chanlewis said:

“Getting vulnerable patients home quickly and safely is much better for them, their recovery and lessening the risk of them getting Covid-19, as well as freeing up hospital beds more quickly for other patients”.