Virtual ward cost similar to inpatient care, says contentious study’s author

The cost of discharging patients to virtual wards becomes “equitable” with inpatient care over time, analysis suggests – despite initial findings that it was much more expensive.

A research project conducted at Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh Teaching Hospitals in 2022 published its results last year, which found the cost of avoiding a bed day in hospital by discharging a patient to a virtual ward was £935 per day, compared to an average cost of £536 per day for keeping a patient in a general inpatient hospital bed.

But, the study’s lead author has now told HSJ that, following a second year of monitoring, the cost of step-down virtual ward care had decreased to be roughly the same as traditional inpatient care.

The initial study sparked significant debate, and was met with criticism from NHS England, which said the results were “misleading”, particularly due to its limited scope and time frame. 

Having evaluated WWL’s virtual ward provision again in 2023, Martin Farrier, director of digital medicine at WWL and lead author of the original paper, said the cost of step-down virtual ward care was “still significant” but now “equitable” with keeping a patient in a hospital bed.

Dr Farrier said the majority of the cost per patient was from staffing, and this had fallen significantly in year two.

He said: “In the first year, [staff] said they were flat out, but they weren’t flat out, they were just getting used to their system. They sped up with time, [so] the capacity of the system becomes much larger… [There’s] a mixture of things going on. But what you then get… is the costs come down and they become equitable with the cost of hospital care.”

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Source: HSJ, 10 March 2025