Quick guide: Supporting patients' choices to avoid long hospital stays

This is one of a series of quick, online guides produced by NHS England, co-branded with the Housing LIN, providing practical tips and case studies to support health and care systems.

This new multi-agency Quick Guide aims to provide better support to patients and families in making their choices and to support health and care systems to reduce delayed transfers of care.

Drawing on the work of local government, health and social care organisations, this guide contains practical tips, examples and links to useful documents:

- A checklist for local areas to use to identify areas for improvement
- Information on existing solutions to common problems, including tools to support choice and environments to support choice (e.g. intermediary placements)
- A template policy and template patient letters which can be adopted locally

These resources will be useful for both commissioners and providers and showcase good examples of how people across the country are working with the care sector to reduce unnecessary hospital admissions and delayed transfers of care.