The Guardian view on care homes: take responsibility and apologise
“We need to do better. Because we are failing our parents, our grandparents, our elders – the greatest generation who built this country. We need to care for them properly.” These are welcome words from a prime minister prepared to accept responsibility for the tsunami of deaths in care homes. Unfortunately they were not issued from the mouth of Britain’s prime minister but Canada’s Justin Trudeau.
For weeks while the NHS was protected, social care in the UK was left to be overwhelmed. The National Audit Office, Whitehall’s spending watchdog, confirmed that in the first month of lockdown, 25,000 patients were discharged from hospitals into care homes and spread the virus when testing was either patchy or non-existent, and personal protective equipment was unavailable. It looks like the elderly were either expendable or collateral damage in the war against Covid-19.
Care home residents could make up more than half the deaths caused directly or indirectly by the coronavirus crisis in England, a grim toll of 34,000. Instead of shouldering responsibility, Boris Johnson blames others, telling MPs it was clinicians who authorised hospital discharges into care homes. This is a slander. It was under guidance from the Department of Health and Social Care that elderly people, with no tests, were sent into care homes. Hardworking medics did not deliberately risk care homes, but a lack of testing surely did.
Mr Johnson has also used statistics to mislead about care homes, claiming that the numbers of patients being sent to them from hospitals dropped by 40% in the first month. But discharges to all destinations fell during the pandemic, because people were either dying or not seeking medical help. The proportion of those patients going to care homes from a hospital doubled. When Mr Johnson is not fabricating, he is exaggerating. His government claimed to have hit its target of testing all care workers and elderly residents this week by counting all the tests it delivered rather than completed.
A series of dubious ethical decisions were taken that contributed to the premature deaths of thousands of older people. This occurred despite the government knowing since 2017 that the social care system was not fit to deal with a pandemic.
Mr Johnson perhaps thinks an apology is an admission of weakness. But the government bears some responsibility for the appalling death toll in social care and the prime minister must apologise. Possibly he thinks that saying sorry should wait for the inevitable public inquiry. Loved ones died needlessly and the bitter memory of the shambles won’t quickly fade. Mr Johnson might want to put things right first. But mistakes must be recognised before they can be meaningfully corrected. The pain and hurt must be acknowledged before trust can be regained. Otherwise even sincere apologies will look like they are being delivered at the guilty party’s convenience – and will count for very little.