Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 04 November 2020
What has happened in our care homes is the tragedy of Scotland’s pandemic story. While it certainly did not do it out of malice, by sin of omission and commission the Government has failed some of our most vulnerable residents.
If we cast our minds back to the foothills of the emergency, our public health priority at the outbreak of the pandemic was to manage the spread of the virus in a way that allowed our front-line health services to cope. We all subscribed to that and absolutely understood it. In early spring, in those weeks of high infection, the Government frantically prepared for the tsunami of Covid cases with the construction of the NHS Louisa Jordan hospital and the rapid decampment of older people from our hospitals into our care homes.
The minutes from the Scottish Government’s Covid advisory group meeting on 2 April cover several topics, but two points stand out. First, our scientists were struggling to understand how the virus was moving around in Scottish hospitals despite infection control measures; secondly, the Government wanted to speed up the movement of elderly patients into care homes. The international health community had been screaming about asymptomatic viral transmission since January, yet the Government accelerated the movement of more than 1,500 hospital patients whose Covid status was unknown into care homes that had precious little PPE at the time.
In that decision lay what may well come to be regarded as one of the biggest public health disasters led by policy in this country. Our rate of care home deaths is much higher than the rates that have been recorded elsewhere in these islands. To make matters worse, we now know that the Government was releasing into care homes patients who had tested positive for Covid-19, which put a time bomb at the heart of the most vulnerable homes in our country. For me and my party, that is unforgivable.
Beyond the early death of care home residents, which could and should have been avoided, another misery that has been visited on the residents of this nation’s care homes and their families has been the isolation that they have experienced. For the best part of nine months, tens of thousands of Scottish people living in care homes have had to go without the physical contact and presence of those whom they love the most. That has caused untold harm to the mental wellbeing of people who were struggling in any case.
Many family members made an appropriate point to the Government in a demonstration outside Parliament that I and other members, including Monica Lennon, attended. They highlighted that family members are not just sightseers nor do they come to a care home just to have a cup of tea. They are there because they care and they want to be part of the physical care of their loved ones. They are unpaid family carers and, as such, they take health and infection control measures as seriously as any agency or in-house staff would. In fact, they go further, and they made this point to us at the demonstration. Family members who go into care homes act as informal inspectors—they pick up on problems, things that have been missed or corners that have been cut. That function has been lost to our care homes for the time that we have been denying those families access.
I am grateful to the Scottish Government for moving on the matter. I very much hope that we will start to see life being breathed back into our care homes. That is not to denigrate the very hard work of our care home staff, who have worked tirelessly to make the situation as bearable as possible. We need to ensure that that continues. However, we also need a public inquiry, so that we can learn from the mistakes at the start of the pandemic in order to avoid the future mistakes that may still come.