A pilot project in which health workers prescribe warm homes for vulnerable people at risk from a lack of heat has delivered “remarkable” results.
Energy Systems Catapult (ESC) has been running the project with the NHS in Gloucestershire and energy charity Severn Wye and is now looking to roll it out further.
ESC’s Matthew Lipson told Utility Week’s Future of Heat conference this week that the project was borne out of concerns that of the £2.5 billion available per year in the government’s fuel poverty strategy, only 16% actually goes to fuel poor households. He also cited the problems in identifying those who need help most and where this was best directed.
He said: “We wanted to find a better way to solve this problem. What if health workers could find people in need of help and pay for their warmth? The idea being that keeping people well at home will ultimately save the NHS as well as being better for patients. After all, the average stay in hospital is nine days.”
He went on to describe the Warm Home Prescription programme, in which the health service in Gloucestershire identified respiratory patients with winter fuel cost challenges.
He explained: “They prescribed them a warm home through social prescription. Then the energy charity, Severn Wye, who are absolutely brilliant, visited them to check they could use their heating system and it actually worked and they understood how to use their controls and then they just credited their account.”
He added: “The results were completely remarkable. Patients often no longer needed to go to the GP and they didn’t end up in A&E. Particularly during Omicron, that was very important.
“It enabled the health service to add other things to help the patient, like making sure they got their jabs, and ensuring they could schedule in energy efficiency improvements when they needed them.”
Lipson said the plan was to scale the scheme up across the region and said there was “no reason” it couldn’t be rolled out to other NHS trusts.