A 'care hotel' on the edge of Norwich set up to help speed up hospital discharge is still seen as a temporary solution by health leaders.

The first patients have already started being admitted to the makeshift facility at the Holiday Inn in Ipswich Road, with some having since been moved back to their homes.

Launched at the end of January, the 'care hotel' sees hospital patients who do not require a bed, but are still waiting for care arrangements before they can go home, put up in a wing of the hotel and given around the clock care provided by Abicare.

The scheme, which can take 15 patients at a time, was launched as a way of freeing up beds in acute and community hospitals to alleviate pressure elsewhere in the healthcare system.

With patients now being accepted into the hotel, Cath Byford, chief nurse of Norfolk and Waveney Clinical Commissioning Group said she was pleased with how it was going - but that she still viewed it as a temporary measure.

She told a meeting of the CCG's board of directors: "I'm really pleased with what is happening so far at the care hotel and we went on record very clearly at the beginning to say that we would be having a very close oversight of it with the provider and making sure that patients that went through it had a really positive experience.

"But we're also trying to do more than just place people there while they're waiting for their care package."

"I visited the care hotel a week ago and was really pleased to see people walking around in their normal clothes and exercising and the feedback we have had when we spoke to patients was that that they were receiving a really good experience and that the care provider was doing a really good job.

"So, so far so good. I do, however, still see this as a temporary model and actually what we want to do most is for people to go directly home from the hospital at the right time.

"But considering all the challenges we have experienced over the course of the last three months I'm really delighted that while people haven't been able to go straight home, they've gone into a different model of care and experienced a really good outcome."