EXASPERATED
‘Refusal to test before discharge’
HUNDREDS of residents were discharged from hospitals to nursing homes without being tested for coronavirus, according to the head of Nursing Homes Ireland.
NHI CEO Tadhg Daly will tell Dáil deputies at a Covid-19 committee today how the sector was left ‘exasperated’ and without a ‘specific plan’ to deal with the coronavirus.
The Irish Daily Mail has obtained a copy of the statement Mr Daly will read to the Covid-19 Committee in Leinster House this morning. Mr Daly claims that there was a ‘refusal to test’ patients being transferred from acute hospitals into nursing homes to free up beds at the height of the pandemic.
There have been 264 clusters of Covid-19 in nursing homes to date, and 678 people with the virus have died.
Nursing Homes Ireland will say that key State organisations left the nursing home sector and its residents ‘isolated’ in the early days of Covid-19.
In his address, Mr Daly will tell the Committee that ‘hundreds’ of patients were transferred into nursing homes from acute hospitals that refused to test them for Covid-19 before transfer.
‘Our providers who, despite challenges with resources at everylevel, ensured excellent care continued to be provided and hundreds of discharges were facilitated from our acute hospitals.
This was despite refusal to test patients prior to discharge from hospitals to nursing homes and we know the extent of community transmissions,’ he said.
The nursing home sector was left ‘exasperated’, with Mr Daly saying the focus was ‘almost exclusively on our acute hospitals’. This is despite the awareness, he says, that the virus would ‘disproportionately’ impact older people.
The challenge to the nursing home sector was made even greater by ‘insufficient testing of residents and staff, mass shortfall of PPE… aggressive recruitment of nursing home staff initially by the HSE, and discharges from acute hospitals to nursing homes without testing’.
Sinn Féin Health spokeswoman Louise O’Reilly, who is on the Covid-19 Committee, said she will be seeking clarity from the Minister as to ‘whether or not it is possible that the virus got into nursing homes when there was an initial transfer of patients out of the acute hospitals sector into the nursing home sector’.
‘I will be checking how many people were transferred out without being tested and I want to know if that’s how virus got into the nursing homes,’ she said. Mr Daly said that in January NHI began engagement with nursing home providers, and by February NHI requested ‘dedicated guidance’ for residential care settings from the Department of Health. However, the first guidance was not given until March 23.
Mr Daly singles out the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF), the authority responsible for the commissioning of nursing home care, saying they ‘fell silent as homes incurred considerable costs to manage the pandemic’.
However, he says that the Department of Health ‘eventually intervened’ and commended the Minister for Health Simon Harris for ‘eventually bringing senior officials from his Department and the HSE around the table to support the sector in coping with Covid-19’. Mr Daly, who will take questions from the committee members at today’s committee meeting, added that: ‘Key State organisations left the nursing home sector and its residents isolated in those early days.’
Last week the Minister for Health Simon Harris announced the establishment of a COVID-19 nursing home expert panel following a recommendation from the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET). However, Mr Daly says that the voice of nursing homes is ‘absent’ from the table as the Committee begins its examination. Ms O’Reilly said that it is clear the sector was left without a plan to deal with the spread of the virus. ‘I think the big thing is that there wasn’t a plan in relation to nursing homes,’ she said.
A spokesperson for Minister for Health Simon Harris said that: ‘The group is made up of clinical experts – a geriatrician, a senior nurse etc. But there will be opportunities for all stakeholders including frontline workers to feed into process. Their perspective is important.’