Status of Health and Social Care Act 2024 statutory guidance requiring carers' involvement in discharge planning

Law and practice Other
1

Hi All. I have a query that is not strictly about the MHA. It is about the Health and Social Care Act 2024 and the statutory guidance that says that where appropriate hospitals must involve carers in the discharge planning. My 2 questions are:

  1. Does this apply to discharges from mental health inpatient care?
  2. What precisely is the status of statutory guidance? Does breaching such guidance mean the hospital has acted illegally?

Tks.

Jonathan Wells

2

Hi Jonathan

I might be completely wrong but do you mean Care Act 2014 and the accompanying Care and support statutory guidance - GOV.UK?

3

Hi Jonathan,

I’d be interested to know what answers you get. My experience so far is that psychiatric hospitals involve us as a care home and are very proactive in seeking our input, while the general health hospital teams not only do not reach out but often misinform us, openly refuse to involve us or take into consideration our views, and on a few occasions even have attempted a discharge against our protests based on safety concerns.

I believe the guidance is just that - a guidance, and so despite it being best practice suggestion, the hospitals ‘get away’ with not following it.

4

Tks Aleksandra

My query and the related guidance are about the involvement of unpaid carers and families. I think you are talking about residential care staff, which is different.

b/w Jonathan.

5

Which guidance do you have in mind? There’s DHSC, ‘Statutory guidance: Discharge from mental health inpatient settings’ (26/1/24) which makes regular mention of carers.

6

Yes this is about statements in the DHSC statutory guidance from January 2024.

The simplest way I can put my query is: the guidance says the relevant trust has a statutory duty to “have regard to this guidance.” What does that mean in practice? Can a Trust simply say " we thought about this for 5 minutes but decided to go ahead and discharge the patient anyway without involving the family?

Jonathan.