Care homes: a scandal of neglect
“Few governments can claim to have handled the pandemic flawlessly,” said The Times.
They have had to grapple with a new disease on the basis of imperfect information – and inevitably, many mistakes have been made. Polls suggest that most British voters are ready to accept “early missteps”. But Boris Johnson “is now in danger of forfeiting this goodwill, not so much because of mistakes that have been made, but because of the Government’s refusal to admit to them”. Most obvious is the disaster unfurling in our care homes, where the “evidence suggests ministers were too slow to recognise the risks and too quick to discharge vulnerable patients from hospitals to the care system without testing for Covid-19”. According to official figures, at least 11,600 people have died of coronavirus in UK care homes since the start of the pandemic – though that figure is almost certainly an underestimate. Around 40% of overall UK deaths come from care homes; four in ten care homes in England have had suspected cases.
At last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions, Johnson was at a loss to explain the death rate, said Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. Faced by a “calm, polite and utterly merciless” grilling from Labour leader Keir Starmer, he flailed around helplessly – “unable to give a convincing answer to any question” – before descending into a “cascade of waffle”. At one point, he even tried to deny that, as late as 12 March, the Government was still advising people that infection in care homes was “very unlikely”. The PM blurted out that “it wasn’t true the advice said that”, even though Starmer was quoting it “word for word, from a sheet of paper in front of him”.
“When the reckoning is done on the extent to which poor government exacerbated Britain’s Covid-19 crisis, it is likely care homes will be the scandal,” said Philip Collins in The Times. But the truth is that this has been “a long time coming”: the sector is underfunded, understaffed and largely ignored. “Buried away in local government rather than in the sanctuary of the NHS”, it has suffered the brunt of austerity. If we wish to improve matters, we face a limited range of options. We can wrap social care into the NHS, funding it through taxation. We can ask the individual to pay, drawing on savings or equity released from the family home. Or we can do some combination of the two. But we need to take that decision and fund care properly. It is the “very least” this Government can do, “once the immediate medical crisis is past”.