Hospital-run care home that frees up beds to close

A ground-breaking facility that helps free up beds at a Lancashire hospital and also doubles up as a care home is to close.

Finney House, which supports Royal Preston Hospital, will shut in phases over the coming months amid a £5m funding shortfall for the service.

It comes little more than two years after the hotel-style accommodation, on Flintoff Way in the city, opened in its current form.

It will result in the loss of 64 beds that hospital bosses have been using to reduce the number of patients stuck on the wards of the Royal Preston who are medically fit to leave, but have nowhere else to go.

It also means the 28 residents who call Finney House their permanent home will have to find somewhere new to live before the shutdown is complete in early June.

As many as 160 staff will be affected, but the NHS says "every effort" will be made to redeploy them elsewhere in order to avoid job losses.

Both Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (LTH), which runs the service, and the Lancashire and South Cumbria Integrated Care Board (ICB), which plans and commissions healthcare in the region, were last month placed on an intensive financial recovery programme by NHS England.

LTH had a £58m savings target for the 2024/25 financial year – much of which had to be delivered in the latter part of that timeframe – while the ICB was trying to save £530m over the same period.

Finney House was relaunched in November 2022 and was heralded as an innovative way of better integrating health and social care.

The idea was to improve the flow of patients through the Royal Preston by preventing delays in the discharge process having a knock-on effect in accident and emergency – and even on the ambulance service – when people could not be transferred into wards because of a lack of space.

Current Finney House patients will not be affected, because beds will close gradually to new admissions from hospital and the community, meaning numbers will reduce in a planned way.

However, the 28 permanent residents of the facility, which opened as a care home in 2016, will have to leave by the time of the full closure in less than three months.

The trust says it will be working closely with Lancashire County Council and the ICB to support them to find homes elsewhere.

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