The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
NHS warned of care home risks
Health chiefs told to move patients anyway
NHS Scotland warned health chiefs discharging elderly hospital patients would put pressure on care homes but told them to go ahead with the controversial policy anyway, newly released documents reveal.
An NHS Scotland letter confirms the Scottish Government was taking action to prepare care homes for an influx of residents at the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The letter acknowledged the strain this would put on the care sector. It was sent to health boards and local authorities on March 6.
It was followed by one from Ms Freeman – who announced yesterday evening she would be stepping down as a cabinet secretary and MSP at May’s Holyrood election – to councils later in the month telling them there was an “immediate and urgent requirement” to increase support and staff capacity in care homes.
The correspondence sheds more light on the pressure put on health boards to move elderly patients out of hospitals into care homes to free up beds.
The transfer of elderly, untested patients from hospital has been linked to the high number of Scottish care home deaths.
The Scottish Government has confirmed 1,431 untested patients were moved to care homes between March 1 and April 21, before testing became mandatory.
Of 4,216 Scottish coronavirus deaths so far, 46% – 1,956 – were in care homes.
Ms Sturgeon and Ms Freeman have become embroiled in a furious row over the issue after the first minister last week insisted her government had not been involved in individual “clinical decisions” about the movement of patients.
The NHS Scotland letter revealed the Scottish Government was looking at moving patients into care homes when it was signed by Malcolm Wright, the then-chief executive of the body on March 6.
“We now need to be able to create capacity and space within our hospitals in recognition that, as the expected rise of incidence of Covid-19 infection takes hold in Scotland, this will place unprecedented demands on our acute hospital system by people who are critically ill,” said Mr Wright, who has since resigned from the post on health grounds.
“I appreciate that this necessarily increases the pressures on community health and social care systems at a point when there are challenges around how to provide care to vulnerable people in their own homes, with this population making up the overwhelming majority of people who need health and care provision.”
The letter gives a target of reducing delayed discharge from 1,650 cases to 1,250 by April 9.
At the weekend, further evidence of the Scottish Government’s preparations to get care homes ready for an influx of patients came in a letter from Ms Freeman, dated March 24, to councils and social care partnerships.
Donald Cameron, the Tory health spokesman, said: “These jaw-dropping revelations cast yet more doubt on the repeated assertions by SNP ministers that the policy of sending people to care homes had nothing to do with them.
“It’s one thing to warn health boards and councils that this policy would put pressure on care homes, but it is absolutely stunning that they told them to go ahead anyway.”
Ms Sturgeon said yesterday there was “no contradiction whatsoever” between the policy to reduce delayed discharge and March’s guidance for individuals going to care homes to have a clinical risk assessment.