Rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic: failure of an augmented home help scheme after discharge to reduce the length of stay in hospital.

An augmented home help service was set up in the Rhondda Valley in South Wales in order to facilitate discharge from hospital of elderly subjects who were kept in hospital because of mainly social problems. Patients were allocated to the new service or the pre-existing services according to their date of birth. The extra social support did not result in a faster discharge from hospital, nor in any improvement in well-being of the intervention group, largely because the small extra amount of service input was inadequate to ameliorate the extreme physical, mental and social problems experienced by the study group.