CARE HOMES FOR THE COVID CASES
Frail patients will isolate in special units to stop wave of new deaths
VULNERABLE and frail hospital patients who test positive for Covid must in future be sent to specialised care homes, ministers have ordered.
Infected elderly patients will therefore be kept out of ordinary nursing homes, or directed to isolated wings, where they are out of contact with other residents.
About 500 Covid care homes will be set up as part of a Health Department winter campaign aimed at keeping the majority of England’s care homes free of the virus.
However, there were warnings last night that the plan risks consigning older people to potentially deadly care homes that amount to prisons, and that families may be denied both a say in where their relatives live and the right to check on the conditions they live in.
The Covid care homes have been officially termed ‘ designated settings’. A letter from senior Health Department officials to social services and NHS chiefs said: ‘Anyone with a Covid-19 positive test result being discharged into or back into a registered care home setting must be discharged into an appropriate designated setting and cared for there for the remainder of the required isolation period.’
At least one Covid care home, or wing of an existing care home, is to be set up in every local area.
Patients must remain there until they have completed an isolation period and are considered free of the virus.
The move has been ordered by Health Secretary Matt Hancock to try to avoid a repeat of the wave of deaths in care homes earlier this year. Hospitals under instructions to clear their wards for a flood of virus patients sent large numbers of older patients – some regarded as ‘bed blockers’ – into care homes. The resulting spread of the virus through care homes is thought to have killed 20,000 people.
Some £588million has been set aside to help pay for hospital discharges and the new Covid care homes.
The Care Quality Commission regulator has been instructed to be prepared to inspect 500 poten- tial Covid homes.
The first are likely to be set up in the Tier Three and Tier Two lockdown areas that currently have the highest level of infections.
The letter, sent by senior Department of Health official Tom Surrey, said that designated settings will have ‘policies, procedures, equipment and training in place to maintain infection control and support the care needs of residents’. It added: ‘ In order to meet this potential demand across England as quickly as possible, we aim for every local authority to have access to at least one CQC designated accommodation by the end of October.’
Mr Surrey told social services chiefs that details of how the new system will work will be distributed ‘shortly’ to ‘resolve what we recognise are practical concerns’.
He added: ‘Everyone being discharged into a care home must have a reported Covid test result and this must be communicated to the care home prior to the person being discharged from hospital.’
Since the spring, care homes have been allowed to refuse to accept virus-infected patients, and greater understanding of the need to screen temporary staff has also helped reduce care home deaths to below average levels.
However, there have since been much higher than average numbers of deaths in private homes of those who may have been asked or told to stay away from care homes. Critics warned of deep risks to the separate Covid care home plan. Former pensions minister Baroness Altmann said: ‘I welcome the thought being put into this but it needs to be set up properly.
‘They need to be places people want to go to, and not prisons.
‘It is desperately important that families should be able to visit. We do not want people dying while their families do not know what is going on. It might be a good idea to use empty hotels, if they can be properly equipped.’
Kathy Gyngell, editor of the Contives servative Woman website, whose 97-year-old mother died in a care home last year, said: ‘I am terrified. Old people who test positive will be off-loaded into what will inevitably be chosen from the cheapest and poorest-staffed homes.
‘Families will have no say over what is happening to their relaand they will not be able to get in to check how they are being treated – it is hard enough to do that now. What will happen is that people seen as bed blockers will be sent to a Covid gulag.’
Age UK charity director Caroline Abrahams said she would not ‘want to see this initiative leading to older people who are not truly medically fit enough to leave hospital being discharged too quickly, or others being refused admission and placed in a Covid- secure wing of a care home instead, when a hospital bed is what they really need’.
Professor Martin Green of the care home umbrella body Care England said: ‘It is vital that providers have a much greater degree of detail, for example information on leaving the facility, care functions on offer, refusal of visits, role of the regulator and of course funding considerations.’
A spokesman for the Health Department said: ‘Our priority is the prevention of infection in care homes and ensuring that everyone receives the right care, in the right place, at the right time.’
‘Families should be able to visit’ ‘Bed blockers will be sent to a gulag’