Hall says her team aims to get people out of hospital within 24 hours of being medically fit and has helped to speed up discharges at Lister Hospital in recent years. <\/p>\n
Numbers rose from 6,429 in 2022-23 to a peak of 7,020 in 2024-25. But she says it is becoming more difficult.<\/p>\n
“The main thing has been the complexity of the need and balancing the number of people coming into the hospitals that we need to discharge,” she says.<\/p>\n
“There used to be time when people stayed in hospital for longer. Now a lot of that care is completed in the community.”<\/p>\n
She says pressures on beds mean people are discharged sooner, often with higher ongoing needs.<\/p>\n
“More people want to live in their own homes, so we need to support them to live where they want to be,” she says.<\/p>\n
But Nikki Jefferson, a senior lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire, says policy and funding often focus too narrowly on discharge.<\/p>\n
“It often misses the wider reasons behind why there’s people in hospital,” she says.<\/p>\n
“Can they be enabled and kept at home without the need for that very significant amount of medical support?<\/p>\n
“So I think it’s really important that when you’re looking at how do you make things better, that you consider every aspect of the pathway.”<\/p>\n
Colvill agrees that prevention matters.<\/p>\n
“A lot seemed to change over Covid; things came and went,” she says, adding that better community support can help people who are isolated avoid crisis in the first place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hall says her team aims to get people out of hospital within 24 hours of being medically fit…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":434726,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[134,527,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-434725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=434725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434725\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/434726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=434725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=434725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=434725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}