An extra £600 million is needed to help discharge medically fit patients and free up hospital beds, health leaders say.
NHS bosses want the government to immediately allocate funds for the next six months to avoid “bed blocking” and rehabilitate patients at home.
NHS Confederation and NHS Providers are among the bodies that have written to the Treasury and health secretary urging them to act.
They said that extra beds in rehabilitation centres and extra staff for home visits risked being scaled back or cut entirely if funding was not provided, a move that would result in more people fit for discharge staying in hospital longer than needed.
Urgent action was needed to ensure that hospitals had the capacity to deal with the 5.3 million patients awaiting treatment, they said.
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The NHS was given £600 million for April until the end of September to fund safe discharge, but there has been no guidance on what will happen from October 1. The lack of information is causing panic among health and care leaders who are concerned that services such as home visits and community rehab centres will be stopped.
Evidence shows that the “discharge to assess” approach has helped to free up 30,000 beds and 6,000 staff, including 4,000 nurses. It also cut by a third the amount of patients staying in hospital for more than three weeks.
“We are concerned that removing discharge to assess funding will create a barrier to addressing backlogs of care and treatment,” the letter read. “There is a real possibility that the gains in reducing hospital length of stay will be reversed to a pre-Covid level, increasing bed occupancy levels in hospitals and reducing their capacity for elective procedures, which would stall the progress of the elective recovery programme.”
The letter has also been signed by Healthwatch England, the British Red Cross, the Local Government Association, and Age UK.
Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said: “With the NHS facing a mammoth backlog of care and with the government committed to unveiling a comprehensive social reform package in the autumn, this is surely not the time to be cancelling an initiative that has worked so well.”
