Councillors call for care home contingency plans
Bath and North East Somerset Council is being urged by councillors to draw up contingency plans to help care homes in future pandemics.
It comes after the publication of an independent report into the high rate of deaths in care homes during the Covid-19 pandemic. Bath and North East Somerset had the highest rate of Covid-19 deaths in care homes in all of England in 2021 - more than double the national average - despite a relatively low number of deaths in the area as a whole.
The report, by NIHR ARC West, did not identify any practices in the area’s care homes as causing the high deaths but found staff shortages and care home layouts were key issues that caused problems in Bath and North East Somerset and care homes in other nearby areas.
In response, councillors on Bath and North East Somerset Council’s scrutiny panel on children, adults, health and wellbeing voted on April 15 to urge the council to “develop contingency plans that will enable care homes to be supported with emergency staff for pandemics and other unexpected events.”
They also called for the council to look at how care home layout and structure could support better isolation and infection control, to give care homes “more consideration and autonomy” to balance the needs of infection control and the physiological and social wellbeing of their residents, and to support communication to reduce feelings of “abandonment and isolation.”
Councillors said they recognised the “huge effort, commitment and sacrifice” of care home staff.
A major research aim the NIHR ARC West report had been tasked with was to determine why Bath and North East Somerset had a higher rate of Covid-19 deaths in care homes than other areas. But at the meeting on Monday, vice chair of the panel Liz Hardman (Paulton, Labour) said: “We don’t really have an answer.”
The report consisted of a “quantitative study” looking at data about care homes collected by Bath and North East Somerset Council, and a “qualitative study” consisting of interviews with care home staff. But the report stated researchers were “unable to collect sufficient data.”
Researchers also told the committee that they had emailed all 77 care homes in Bath and North East Somerset to ask them to take part in their interviews. They later contacted care homes across the West of England after only a small amount responded. Researchers ended up interviewing 14 people from five care homes in and outside Bath and North East Somerset.
But Paul Scott, council associate director of public health, said there had been an analysis done by the council a year ago into why the death rate in care homes in the area had been so high. He said: “That pattern of having a higher percentage of deaths occurring in our care homes and a lower percentage occurring in a hospital than the England average had been there for about 10 years. [...] That’s a pattern that we see in B&NES.” He said that in the last figures available, the area had the second highest figure for people dying in their usual place of residence out of 150 English local authorities, something which is increasing nationwide which he believes to be due to more care planning. He added the area also had a lower rate of escalating people from care homes to hospital.
Mr Scott said: “We had lower deaths from Covid-19 in our population overall at that time, lower than the England average. [...] We had one of the highest care home death rates but one of the very lowest hospital death rates, and in fact if those two things had averaged out we wouldn’t be having the conversation at all probably.”
Dr John Banks, of the team behind the report, said: “The overall finding from us was that the practices and the behaviour that we identified within care homes both quantitatively and qualitatively, did not show any indication that it contributed to the particular death rates that you found in B&NES.”
He added: “The biggest challenge that was experienced during that time was staffing shortages.”