Hunt’s hypocrisy

Hollowwordsonsocialcare

IT IS rather galling listening to Jeremy Hunt describe care homes as a “Cinderella service” and call for a “longterm plan”, as he has again done, when he had six years to act as Health Secretary.

Words that many will regard as hypocritical, they came as Mr Hunt began a Parliamentary inquiry of the Government’s handling of Covid in his current capacity as chair of the Health and Social Care Select Committee.

And while The Yorkshire Post has previously maintained that former Ministers should not be in a position to effectively mark their own homework, especially given how the Department of Health’s pandemic planning during Mr Hunt’s tenureship is open to debate, he was right to admonish his successors for allowing hospital patients to be discharged into care homes while carrying Covid symptoms.

It did prompt this admission from Helen Whately, the Care Minister, that “some care homes had felt under pressure to accept people who had been discharged, and that should not have been the case”.

A telling admission of failure that must not be repeated in the second wave of cases, it came just as the Scarborough- based Independent Care Group said deaths in its sector were “creeping up” and that the Government needed to “provide urgent, emergency short- term support”.

Specifically, it also said the ability of care homes to respond to Covid had been undermined by under- funding and political neglect by successive governments, including the period from 2012- 18 when Mr Hunt was Health Secretary. Perhaps he’d like to care to respond to this before his next self- serving lecture in sanctimony.