Delivery of care home testing ‘not guaranteed’
NICOLA Sturgeon has admitted she cannot guarantee that every patient being discharged from hospital to a care home will have received two negative Covid-19 tests.
Yesterday the First Minister said that this ‘should happen’ but she could not say with ‘100 per cent confidence’ that official policy was being followed.
On April 21, the Scottish Government demanded that all patients being transferred from a hospital to a care home would have to have two negative tests before being moved.
Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie asked Miss Sturgeon whether or not she could confirm that all hospital patients are now being tested before moving to care homes.
He said: ‘We need to know that all new residents have had two negative tests before they are admitted to care homes. Is that always the case?’
Miss Sturgeon said that this ‘should happen’ but added: ‘I accept that I cannot stand here and say with 100 per cent confidence that in a big system there is never a circumstance in which a policy is not applied. However, that is the policy and it is what we expect to be applied.’
The First Minister said there would be circumstances ‘ in which, for good clinical reasons, a clinician will decide that it is not appropriate to conduct an invasive test on a person’.
She added: ‘A frail, elderly patient might be at the end of
‘Spin and sleight of hand’
their life, for example. I cannot countermand the decision of a clinician on that, but the policy is very clear.’
Covid-19 in residential facilities across Scotland has led to nearly 2,000 deaths.
At Holyrood, Miss Sturgeon was asked about a Public Health Scotland report which found that more than 100 hospital patients were sent to care homes despite having tested positive for coronavirus.
More than 3,000 were transferred without being tested.
The extraordinary findings also showed homes where residents had been discharged from hospital were nearly three times more likely to be hit by a Covid-19 outbreak than those with no discharged patients.
Almost one in three homes had a coronavirus outbreak between March and June, with 1,915 Covid-related deaths.
Miss Sturgeon dismissed calls for an immediate public inquiry into the impact of the coronavirus crisis on care homes.
She said that with Scotland in the ‘grip of a second wave’ of the virus, the time was not right for such an investigation.
The First Minister restated her commitment to holding a ‘ full public i nquiry’ i n due course. At First Minister’s Questions, Miss Sturgeon faced calls from Scottish Conservative Holyrood l eader Ruth Davidson for an i nquiry to start immediately.
Miss Davidson said variations in the level of risk meant transferring patients with coronavirus caused a ‘374 per cent increase in risk of seeing Covid rip through care homes’.
She added: ‘This is exactly why we need the public inquiry to start now.’
Miss Davidson also criticised the ‘delay, the spin and the sleight of hand surrounding this report’, claiming a ‘crucial line’ that said it was ‘ likely that hospital discharges are the source of introduction of infection in a small number of cases’ was not included in the final document.
The First Minister told MSPs: ‘ There will be a full public inquiry when the time for that is right, when we have got the country through this next stage of Covid.’