Care homes ‘are the forgotten cousins of NHS’

ACCUSATIONS OF a “reckless” and “negligent” approach to care homes have been levelled at health officials amid claims they have being treated as the “forgotten cousin” of the NHS.

Around 25,000 people were discharged from hospitals to care homes in March and April without a routine testing policy, with senior civil servants acknowledging “huge challenges”.

Department of Health and Social Care mandarin Sir Chris Wormald said the policy was a “rational” one, based on the need to free up hospital beds.

But Tory MP Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown said vulnerable people were being discharged to care homes when they were already in “dire trouble” without training, testing or protective equipment. He added: “Wasn’t this a pretty reckless policy by the Government?”

The Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) was questioning health officials after a report found 25,000 people were affected between March 17 and April 15.

Between March 9 and May 17, around 5,900 care homes across England reported an outbreak – this peaked at just over 1,000 homes in the first week of April.

Official guidance from April 2 stated that care homes needed to make their full capacity available

and that they could admit patients with Covid-19.

Sir Geoffrey told Sir Chris: “You were sending people from hospitals in quite large numbers into the care home sector which you knew was already facing a substantial

Conservative MP Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown. and increasing number of Covid patients of their own.

“They didn’t have sufficient PPE, they didn’t have sufficient testing and they were the most vulnerable group in society.

“How could that have made any sense whatsoever?”

Sir Chris said hospitals were expecting “large numbers of Covid patients” and people who were clinically able to be discharged should have been. He acknowledged there had been “huge challenges” in care homes but “considerable progress” had been made.

“The decisions that we took around discharge, which were all based on the clinical advice at the time... were rational given the evidence that we had on the table at that time,” he said.

He later added: “We are in a process of learning as we go along about these issues. I am confident that based on the information that we had at the time our guidance was correct. That is not the same as saying we would do the same again.”

NHS England’s national medical director Steve Powis said modelling predicted that an unmitigated epidemic would have overwhelmed the health service, with the NHS following the advice given by Public Health England.

He said patients who were “clinically fit” were discharged – but Sir Geoffrey questioned how this could have been known without a testing regime in place.

Sir Chris told the committee that, particularly during March, the number of available tests was “quite limited and much smaller than we would have wanted”.

They didn’t have sufficient PPE, they didn’t have sufficient testing.