Discharging hospital patients to care homes at the start of the pandemic

Although I agree with GSM that many of the owners of care homes are investors, another wonderful legacy of Thatcher, her criticisms of the managers and the staff are incredibly unfair. Many of these people were left to get on with it, with sick residents, worried and demanding families, staff who were often opting to live in, and little or no PPE with which to deal with it. No, we don't know how a Labour government would have dealt with it, but we had a Tory government who had chosen to ignore Operation Cygnet as being too expensive, and who spent billions giving contracts to their pals for PPE, much of which is now rotting in warehouses. The treatment of the elderly in care homes, and the staff in those care homes, however you wish to spin it, was disgraceful.

Germanshepherdsmum

The threads would consist largely of withdrawals. And everyone can find a ‘fact’ to suit their argument.

I don't think that is true. As an example (and not to suggest this is just about Maw). Maw said,

We did not know Covid could be asymptomatic ...

There is has been so much information put on here to show that this isn't true. What has been put on to show that it is? Yet still that comment sit here as if it was a known fact.

It wouldn't stop the discussion to remove or update such a comment, I agree. However, certain facts would have been uncovered and accepted. I do worry about fake news taking this country somewhere we wouldn't want to go if we knew the truth.

What I could never understand at the time was why the care home owners/managers themselves didn’t provide PPE for their staff.

As for discharging people back into their care home it was obviously done out of desperation to free up beds for the anticipated huge influx of patients which actually didn’t happen.
I expect each elderly person was viewed in terms of their on-going care, so for instance someone living alone would possibly be kept in, but those who had somebody at home to care for them would be discharged.

Ppe was prioritised for the nhs.

MissAdventure

Ppe was prioritised for the nhs.

Indeed it was.

www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/30/protective-equipment-being-diverted-from-care-homes-to-hospitals-say-bosses

Local care homes here had no PPE. A friend who has a fabric shop and wholesale contacts organised our local craft group to sew masks and scrubs. We churned out hundreds on our home machines. Similar community efforts were happening all over the country.

www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/23/the-volunteers-making-ppe-on-the-homefront-for-uk-healthworkers-coronavirus

JenniferEccles Thu 28-Apr-22 23:28:59
What I could never understand at the time was why the care home owners/managers themselves didn’t provide PPE for their staff.

It was as plain as it could be that all PPE had been directed to the NHS. There was the occasional muttering that the government would use some of this for Care Homes but little was available to them and, as OakDryad has said, much was done by communities to provide what they could of homemade PPE.

So why didn't you understand that? It was out there in the public domain and yet you are still posting something that a bit of factchecking would tell you is just what you want to believe, rather than the truth.

Discharge policies are bizarre. A relative with PD and dementia was discharged last week to our local hospital and social care is formulating. a home care package. Yesterday a doctor told him alone that he was being discharged to a care home. He phoned his wife in a state, she phoned her son (at work) in a state and her son had to phone the hospital and ask to speak to the doctor why and what possessed him to tell a man with dementia that before telling his wife. He did apologise and explain the whole conversation which was a short term care home while care package set up but really! Unfortunately the doctor did not inform the nurses about what he was going to say as they would have suggested waiting till his wife was there before explaining it both.

Germanshepherdsmum

People running some care homes seem to have shown little or no understanding of the situation. Temporary staff were hired with no care as to where they had been working previously and they transferred covid from one home to another. Some care home owners were shown to have little or no idea of how to deal with the pandemic, many were just investors who were just in it for the money. In a few homes staff recognised the problem and lived in the homes rather than going home. The blame cannot be laid solely at the door of the government. The last pandemic the UK had to deal with was in 1918 and nobody could have predicted the onslaught of covid. So easy to be wise after the event, like Captain Hindsight. What a good opportunity to bash the government. I have yet to hear how any other party would have dealt with it,

So why did the government and the then health Secretary Jeremy Hunt completely ignore the findings of Operation Cygnus that showed we were ill prepared for a future pandemic?

There was a clear policy to empty hospital beds. It was known at the time that asymptomatic transmission was a possibility but Johnson's government ignored that. They claimed to have thrown a protective ring around care homes - a complete lie in my view. I think t okhe underlying policy was obviously to sacrifice older patients in the interests of saving those with economic value. Later it seems the government realised it might be a vote loser so they started sending PPE to homes - too little, too late. It's true that vaccines saved many but most of the government's other decisions were very poor and partying won't go away - 78% of the people believe Johnson lied about it to the Commons. He should go.

I follow the blog of a barrister who comments on current legal issues, and he addressed exactly this topic the other day: davidallengreen.com/2022/04/the-key-paragraph-in-the-significant-covid-and-care-homes-judgment/

Well worth a read, I think.