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Members of the public are being offered up to £1,000 a month to rent spare rooms to patients discharged from hospital in a proposed NHS scheme.

The AirBnB-style plan would put recovering patients with homeowners with no care giving experience and campaigners warn it is dangerous.

The measure is being considered to tackle the chronic bed blocking crisis in the health service which sees patients taking up beds because care packages are not available in the community.

Campaigners and clinicians argue that lodging frail and vulnerable patients with members of the public in return for cash is ripe for abuse.

The website for the new start-up company CareRooms - believed to be the first of its kind in Britain - says: “Earn up to £1,000 per month renting out your spare room.

“The role of a host is to welcome the patient, cook three microwave meals and drinks for them each day and offer conversation where appropriate. Everything else we arrange.”

The drastic solution comes after a report by the Care Quality Commission earlier this month said the health and care system was “straining at the seams” due to staff shortages and ­dwindling bed numbers.

So-called bed blocking where patients are stuck in hospital beds because there is nowhere for them to go has more than tripled since 2014.

It peaked last December at 42,000 days a month, and is expected to rise again as winter approaches.

NHS figures show that 2.2 million hospital “bed days” in England were lost last year due to delayed transfers of care, or bed blocking.

Rising demand has seen hospital admissions rise by 16% in the last six years when the number of beds fell by 8%.

CareRooms is recruiting “hosts” in Essex who could earn up to £50 a night putting up people recuperating from a hospital stay.

The company said it will transform spare rooms and annexes with a private bathroom into “secure care spaces for patients who are waiting to be discharged”.

The proposed scheme, revealed in a story by the Health Service Journal, will offer “host protection” as well as a helpline and training.

NHS bodies and local authorities will take part with patients recruited from Southend University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

The trial will initially involve 10 hosts and 30 patients over a three month period.

Campaign group Save Southend A&E claimed the firm was “handing out flyers in the public canteen at Southend Hospital” offering £1,000 a month.

It said: “We are shocked that an NHS trust is endorsing such a company… Offering beds in private residential homes opens a huge can of worms for safeguarding, governance and possible financial and emotional abuse of people at their most vulnerable time.

“It is almost weekly that there are reports of abuse and poor care in registered residential and care homes therefore the monitoring of such ‘placements’ in private homes would be a huge and risky task.”

Shadow care minister Barbara Keeley warned the scheme was “frightening from a safeguarding point of view” and used “untrained members of the public”.

She demanded an answer from Tory ministers over the scheme today in the House of Commons.

Years of savage cuts to local authority budgets have left care in the community services decimated.

New figures released from NHS Digital today showed that annual spending by local authorities on social care rose by £556 million in 2016/17 to £17.5 billion.

The firm is working with NHS organisations and councils in Essex to pilot and finalise how the model will work as it develops “proof of concept” before it goes live.

It says patients would benefit patients, by creating “a safe, comfortable place for people to recuperate from hospital”.

The medical director of the company, which is part of the NHS England’s clinical entrepreneur programme, said it would have governance and quality standards “better than standard practice” to address concerns.

The company’s medical director Harry Thirkettle is a part-time emergency doctor in Essex. He is also listed as the former science editor of the European Medical Journal.

He said: “Everyone’s immediate concern is, understandably, safeguarding. We are working hard to be better than standard practice.

“We are not going off half-cocked… We are not going to start taking on patients until we have satisfied all these different organisations’ governance procedures and committees [NHS providers, commissioners and councils].

“We are really carefully considering this and making sure it is as safe as possible.”

Rooms would be rented out to funders at around £100 a night, with half going to the host. The rest would be used to pay for the care services required and a percentage kept by the company as profit.

The rooms would be paid for by NHS organisations and local councils but could also take bookings from “self payers”.

For self-payers the option would be presented by a hospital’s discharge team alongside existing options like nursing homes, he said.

Dr Thirkettle said the scheme would have a “vigorous” vetting process including detailed interviews and everyone over 18 in the property would have to undergo a DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) check.

Hosts would require three references.

Dr Thirkettle added: “What we’re aiming towards is patients who just need short-term accommodating either before going home or going into long-term care.

“We are looking to find patients who are medically fit for discharge, who don’t have any cognitive impairments.

“The reason they would come to us is because they either live alone and don’t have support or they have mobility issues.

“So you can imagine someone who had a leg fracture and is unable to go up and down their stairs, so until that fracture is healed they could come to us and stay in a ground floor accommodation.”

The pilot involves Southend University Hospital Foundation Trust, Southend and Castlepoint, Rayleigh and Rochford clinical commissioning groups, Essex County Council and Southend Borough Council.

The scheme was helped by NHS England’s Clinical Entrepreneur programme which helps frontline doctors realise ideas and develop their entrepreneurial aspirations.

The former deputy medical director of NHS England, Mike Bewick, is an unpaid adviser to the company.

Mr Berwisk is now chairman of South and Mid Essex sustainability and transformation partnership.

Yvonne Blucher, managing director of Southend University Hospital, said: “We would like to make it clear that only preliminary discussions have been held.

"Clearly if a decision to pilot such a proposal was made we would expect all safety, quality and regulatory arrangements to be satisfied.”