Dr Marden added there was medical evidence that people recovered faster in the “familiarity of their homes”.<\/p>\n
“We think this is a very exciting opportunity. We’re very lucky in Somerset that we have our 13 community hospitals,” he said.<\/p>\n
On average, one person could spend 37 days within a community hospital bed but the same care could be delivered in somebody’s own home in just 17 days, according to Dr Marden.<\/p>\n
However, some people are concerned that reducing the number of community hospital beds would mean people who cannot be treated at home would be sent to general hospitals further away.<\/p>\n
One former employee at Crewkerne Community Hospital, who wished to remain anonymous, told BBC Radio Somerset being in a general hospital on a large ward did not help recovery in the same way as a smaller community hospital.<\/p>\n
Dr Marden added: “Of course, there will be people who have to access hospital-based care. Then, our focus should be to get them back into their communities and ideally back into their own bed at home.<\/p>\n
“We’ve been doing things in a particular way for a long time, but like anything in medicine there’s new opportunities. There’s things we can do in local communities now that we couldn’t have before, like chemotherapies.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dr Marden added there was medical evidence that people recovered faster in the “familiarity of their homes”. “We…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":327806,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4316],"tags":[105,4348,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-327805","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-healthcare","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114993038809335227","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=327805"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327805\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/327806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=327805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=327805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=327805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}