Health Foundation working paper: What do virtual wards look like in England? (February 2024)

Summary

Virtual wards provide hospital-level care to patients in their own homes. There are many different models of virtual wards. Some cover specific conditions (frailty, acute respiratory infections, heart failure wards), while others have a much broader range of patients. In April 2022, NHS England launched its national virtual ward programme with the long term aim of providing 40 to 50 virtual ward beds per 100,000 people in England. So far, every integrated care board in England has introduced virtual wards. Further aims of this programme include improving patient choice and experience, avoiding risks associated with inpatients stays and improving hospital flow by reducing lengths of stay and freeing up beds. Virtual wards have the potential to improve outcomes for both patients and the health care system. But we need high-quality data, careful monitoring and robust evaluations to understand if this is the case – and for which patients and in what contexts. This will provide learning and drive improvement.  

This Health Foundation working paper analyses aggregate national data on virtual wards to describe what virtual wards currently look like across England and discuss the effects of virtual wards on patients, staff and hospital capacity, as well as the gaps in the evidence.