Urgent transfer from care home to hospital
As people live longer and with more and increasingly complex needs, so requests for social care support are increasing. People are frequently moving between health and social care services and their information needs to be up-to-date and available to professionals and staff at the point of care.
The PRSB Urgent Transfer from Care Home to Hospital Standard sets out the information required for the care and support of a person when they are admitted to hospital from a care home in an emergency. It helps to support the NICE guidance recommendations around communication and information sharing for hospital admissions.
Current release
From 01 January 2026, this standard will be owned and managed by NHS England and is made available for reuse or amendment under the Open Government Licence v3.0 (OGL 3.0). A review of the ongoing requirement for this standard will be undertaken by NHS England. Details on this and any update to the standard will be published on the NHS Standards Directory. If you have any questions or feedback relating to this standard, please email: england.standards.assurance@nhs.net.
About this standard
This standard sets out the clinical, demographic, and social information that needs to be available to the clinicians (and other professionals) in hospital in order to care for and support the patient during their hospital stay.
The expected benefits of implementing the standard are:
- Identifies and supports people at risk of less favourable treatment or with less access to services; for example, people with communication difficulties who may require help to access the correct advocacy and access to the necessary adjustments to accommodate their needs in hospital
- Ensures the transition is coordinated. Physical documentation often gets lost, during the transfer of the patient, it can be incomplete, and it can be time-consuming to generate. Use of electronic documentation and this standard is an enabler for achieving that objective and ssupports more integrated and person-centred ways of working, including increased efficiency for multidisciplinary teams
- Improves patient safety by having information which is needed for safe continuity of care available on a timely basis.
However, its implementation must be concurrent with a drive to increase digital maturity across care homes. Also, in order for care home staff to have access to health and social care information held in shared records, the organisation needs to be compliant with the expected standard for health and social care to hold, process or share personal data.
Summary table
Many of the information requirements identified in the Urgent Transfer from Care Home to Hospital Standard would ideally be fulfilled by a shared health and care record with information from the source rather than the care home. This would apply, for example, to information such as history of problems or diagnoses or medications and allergies where the GP record or the hospital record would be the source of this information.
Some information, however, will need to be transferred with the person at the point of transfer such as the reason for the referral and any recent assessments or observations (not held within the shared record) that would provide baseline information for receiving professionals and including a nursing summary of the care needs of the individual and a record of over-the-counter medications.
The following is a table of the sections included in the PRSB Urgent Transfer from Care Home to Hospital standard.
| Demographic and administrative/ legal information | Referral information | Baseline information | Additional medical and social information (current and history) | Needs, wishes and preferences |
| Person demographics | Referral details (who) | Examination findings and observations
| Allergies and adverse reactions | Individual requirements (including Reasonable Adjustments, mobility) |
| GP details | Return response to | Assessments | Medication Administration Record | Care needs summary |
| Professional contacts | Presenting complaints or issues | Investigation results | Problem list | Additional support plans* |
| Personal contacts | History of each presenting complaint or issue | Procedures | About Me | |
| Deprivation of Liberty Safeguarding | Management to date
| Medications (including over-the-counter medications) | Cardio-pulmonary resuscitation
| |
| Safeguarding concerns | Social context | Advance statement | ||
| Risks | Anticipatory Actions | |||
| Mental Capacity Assessment | Anticipatory Medicines / Equipment | |||
| Mental Health Act or equivalent status | Preferred place of care | |||
| Consent for information sharing | Preferred place of death | |||
| Consent for treatment | Contingency plans** | |||
| Advance decision to refuse treatment | ||||
| Lasting power of attorney | ||||
| Property and equipment list | ||||
| Documents |
* This would include relevant support plans only e.g., a behaviour support plan or a moving and handling plan.
** These are plans which set out how predictable risks associated with health and wellbeing are managed if they get worse. These are often known as contingency, safety, or anticipatory plans.