The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
No ‘statistical evidence’ care home Covid cases linked to discharges: FM
Almost 80 patients who tested positive for Covid -19 were transferred from Scottish hospitals to care homes in the weeks immediately before and after lockdown, a new report has revealed.
It comes after a Sunday Post investigation in August showed dozens of elderly patients who had tested positive for the virus were moved into care homes in the weeks surrounding lockdown, as hospitals were urged to prepare for a flood of Covid-19 patients.
T his prompted First Minister Nicola Sturgeon to call on Public Health Scotland to look in detail at the situation, including the numbers of people moved who “may have had the virus”.
The long-awaited report, released yesterday, revealed 78 patients who tested positive for Covid-19 in hospital were discharged to care homes between March 1 and April 21.
Only 650 of the 3,599 elderly patients discharged from hospital during this period had been tested.
The report also reveals that, between April 21 and May 31, a further 278 hospital patients who had previously tested positive for the virus were discharged to care homes, with 233 receiving a negative test prior to discharge, suggesting 45 did not.
Between March 1 and May 31, there were 337 patients moved from hospitals to care homes in the NHS Tayside region and 355 across NHS Fife.
However, there are no figures relating to how many patients had been tested for coronavirus, or whether they had tested positive, broken down by health board.
Speaking during her daily Covid-19 briefing, the first minister said the Public Health Scotland repor t on care homes concludes that, allowing for other factors, such as the size of a care home, “hospital discharges were not found to have con t r ibu ted to a significantly higher risk of an outbreak”.
Quoting directly from the report, she said: “T he analysis does not find statistical evidence that hospital discharges of any kind were associated with care home outbreaks.”
But she added: “Nothing in it detracts from the tragedy of the deaths that have occ urred in care homes over the course of the pandemic, and nothing ever will detract from the heartbreak of those bereaved.”
Public Health Scotland found the percentage of care homes with an outbreak “increased progressively” with the size of the premises, from 3.7% of care homes with fewer than 20 registered places to 90.2% of care homes with more than 90 registered places.
The data also revealed that 13.5% of care homes with no discharges from hospital had an outbreak, compared to 38% of care homes with one or more discharges.
In its report, PHS said that after accounting for care home size and “other care home characteristics”, hospital discharges are “not statistically significant”.
When asked who was responsible for the decisions around care homes, the first minister said she had “never shirked my responsibility”.
However, Ms Sturgeon said she was not responsible for “individual clinical decisions” and“didn’ t know there were particular people who had tested positive taken into care homes”.
In a letter addressed to Scottish Conservative health spokesman Donald Cameron revealed in The Sunday Post last week, the first minister said she had no idea hospital patients who had tested positive for coronavirus were moved to care homes until she read about when the newspaper’s investigation was published in August.
On April 21, Health Secretary Jeane Freeman announced a policy change that introduced a requirement for negative tests before patients could be moved to care homes.
However, The Sunday Post revealed five health boards moved patients who had tested positive after this date – including NHS Grampian and NHS Tayside.
More than 2,000 deaths among elderly care home residents have been linked to the virus.
Ms Freeman will address the significance of care home size in the Scottish Parliament next week, the first minister confirmed.