PLANS are in place to deal with the impact of Worcestershire’s increasing elderly population on the county’s health service.

Worcestershire County Council figures show people aged 65 and older made up 16 per cent of the county’s population in 2001, but this had since increased to 20 per cent – or about 114,600 people in total.

With almost two thirds of patients admitted to hospital in England aged 65 and older, health bosses in England have said more must be done to ensure older people get the care they need while avoiding them having to go to hospital where possible.

In a report presented on Wednesday, January 28, director of planning and development with Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust Sarah Smith said health and care systems across the country as they are currently run were not geared towards caring for older people, who are often suffering from a range of conditions at once.

“The NHS has designed hospital medicine around single organ disease (and) payment systems do not lend themselves to treating patients with multiple and complex conditions,” she said.

“Capacity in the community for intermediate care and support services to help older people remain well, manage crisis and recover from acute episodes is highly variable and generally inadequate to meet demand.”

She said current thinking in the NHS was that improving community and social care for older people was preferable to them taking up beds in acute hospitals.

“Integrated care for older people with frailty, provided closer to home, is seen as a silver bullet, although evidence for cost effectiveness remains patchy and often weak,” she said.

But a report by the Commission into Hospital Care for Frail Older People published in November 2014 warned against being too eager to keep elderly patients out of hospital and instead advised revamping services to be more geared towards them.

The organisation, which runs Worcestershire Royal Hospital, Kidderminster Hospital and Redditch’s Alexandra Hospital, is to continue working with other health bodies in the county to ensure older people were given the best possible care while ensuring there is no deterioration in care for younger patients.

In 1948, the year the NHS was founded, 48 per cent of the population died before they reached 65. Today this has fallen to 14 per cent and the amount of people aged 85 on older has doubled in the past 30 years.