Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment his Department has made of the potential impact of virtual wards on bed capacity in NHS hospitals.

As set out in the National Health Service Delivery plan for recovering urgent and emergency care services, virtual wards enable patients to remain in their own home supported by family or carers to recover quicker in a more comfortable environment. In some cases, virtual wards can replace the need for admission, and in others facilitate people being able to safely leave hospital sooner.

The NHS has successfully rolled out 7,000 virtual ward beds, with capacity increasing by nearly 50% since the summer. It has a further ambition to scale up capacity ahead of next winter to above 10,000 beds, with a longer-term ambition of reaching 40-50 virtual ward beds per 100,000 people. This would mean more than 50,000 admissions a month.