Care homes see increase in deaths by other causes

Katherine Rushton

Sophie Barnes

CARE homes have seen a rise in deaths that have nothing to do with coronavirus as residents are not being taken to hospital to be treated.

HC One, the UK’S biggest care home provider, said that deaths among its 17,500 residents are at around three times last year’s rate but that only half the additional deaths have direct links to Covid-19. Sir David Behan, HC One’s chairman, said that it lost an average of 20 residents a day in April last year but in the two weeks to April 24 this year that rose to “between 60 and 70 a day”.

“About one third of those deaths, in our assessment, are Covid 19 deaths, so there are other deaths in there,” he said. “We’ve got an elevated rate of deaths, and, in part, this is due to the fact that our transfers of people from care homes into hospitals is down from what it’s been in previous years.”

The revelation comes as the Office for National Statistics (ONS) prepares to shed substantial new light on deaths in care homes later today by incorporating into its data more information about care home deaths collected by the Care Quality Commission.

The HC One findings suggest the total for “additional” deaths in care homes could ultimately stretch into the tens of thousands.

Around 2,100 people in UK care homes die each week in April – equivalent to 300 per day – according to ONS figures showing the average number of deaths by location from 2015 to 2019.

If HC One’s experience with nonvirus deaths in its care homes is typical, more than 4,200 care home residents in the UK may have died of other causes in the two weeks to April 24 alone.

On April 17, Care England, the country’s largest representative body for care homes, estimated that it had already had 7,500 fatalities in its homes.

Sir David said that care home residents, without coronavirus, who might have ordinarily died in hospital were now dying in the homes.

However, Prof Martin Green, Care England’s chief executive, warned that they might have survived “if we had a normally functioning system”. “Those people might have been sent to hospital, and returned,” he said.

The Department for Health has been approached for comment.