On Dominic Cummings’s infamous photo of a No10 white board, one can see,
referring to a scenario in which the NHS was overwhelmed, the words: “Who
do we not save?” The answer, one of
the great scandals of the pandemic, turned out to be care home residents.
Yesterday, Matt Hancock was grilled repeatedly over Mr Cummings’s accusation that the Government did not put a shield
around care homes as promised – and it was claimed that the Health Secretary
lied to the Prime Minister about patients being tested before they were discharged back into them. For 24 hours, Mr Hancock
talked about being willing to give answers without straightforwardly supplying one.
On March 19, 2020, hospitals were required by the NHS and the Department of Health and Social Care to start discharging as many patients as they could in
order to free up beds. Between mid-March and mid-April, 25,000 people were released into care homes: there was no
requirement to test. Many other countries made a similar mistake, it is true – nevertheless, the Office for National Statistics
later calculated that care homes
accounted for roughly half of our excess deaths between March 7 and September 18. The policy was reversed on April 15.
Mr Hancock’s half explanation of this horrific blunder is that testing would have been nice but that Britain did not have the
capacity for it yet. In fact, testing was not the only problem: early advice given to the care sector was remarkably lax and the
Government took its time to advise against visits by
those who were “generally unwell”. All that aside, even if the testing capacity was not in place in hospitals, the question still
stands: why on Earth did the NHS release potentially sick patients, some of the most vulnerable, back into the one place
where the virus was guaranteed to thrive?
Mr Hancock appeared reluctant to be drawn on whether he assured Boris Johnson that patients were being tested at that
precise moment or would be in the future – it seems it was more of an aspiration than a fact – but the public, and particularly
those who lost loved ones, has a right to know. If the attitude was that the lives of one set of patients could be placed in
jeopardy in order to prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed – something that, in the event, did not happen – that would
have totally inverted the basic principles of healthcare.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/...nursing-homes/