Care homes and Covid

[cromwell]

Some rather disturbing facts are emerging about what happened at the start of the Covid outbreak last year.
Namely that some patients with Covid were moved out of hospitals and into care homes; further that hospitals were and are being untruthful about this.
25,000 hospital patients were moved out of hospitals into care homes to free up space in NHS wards for the expected wave of covid patients. The problem is that some of those moved already had covid.
Before April 15th last year hospitals did not have to tell care homes if a patient had covid or not. When care homes tried to find out (as you would) if the patient had covid they ran into problems.
Theresa Steed of Tunbridge Wells Care Centre said that when she was asked to take a patient from a local hospital at the start of the pandemic she told a social worker that she was worried about going to the ward to assess the patient's welfare because she had heard that there was covid on that ward. She then received a call from the hospital demanding to know who had told her this, because it wasn't true. When she attended the hospital however, she found the ward was closed - due to Covid.
At Woodlands of Woolley care home (which is where my Father in Law was) the manager asked Pinderfields Hospital for the covid test result of an elderly patient. Pearl Jackson, operations manager of the care home group said "They had crossed off the positive test and put a line through it, then circled the box saying covid negative." On a discharge form seen by the Daily Telegraph a note saying "not tested but temp of 38.9" was scribbled out.
M.artin B.arkley CE of the Mid Yorks Hospital trust said (and this is a modern day classic) "While the referral form was amended to be accurate, we fully accept that the way the form was amended did not comply with best practice as the amendment was not signed or dated and could have caused confusion."

So there you are. The bit that was wrong was the bit saying that the patient had covid. Unfortunately they person saying oops oh no they don't have it forgot to put their name to it, or a date on it. As you would.

I wonder if there will be a full investigation into this? How many patients with covid were, knowingly or otherwise, sent to care homes?
Probably we will never know. "Our" NHS won't want their halo dinting and the politicians have probably already got the whitewash ordered for any upcoming inquiry.

[Workingman]

The whole hospital to care home thing has been a mess since the beginning, and it continues to today. The latest version of the "advice" came in January and it's still as clear as mud. Let's not forget that people have died because of it.

An ex SiL is a community nurse and another a visiting occupational health therapist and they cannot understand why the Nightingales were not used as half-way houses between hospitals and homes. They were well quipped and many of the staff could have come from all those unused volunteers who were once lined up.

[Kaz]

That would have been a really good move Frank! Far too sensible for this lot

[TheOstrich]

I'm sure there will be an "enquiry" of some sort into the whole Covid response sooner or later, and I think what will come out is that the Government and the NHS were in a blind panic right at the start of the pandemic with no real idea of how it was going develop. There will be many mis-steps highlighted and the care homes problem will surely be one of them.

What concerns me is that we are still not learning from our past mistakes. Just to give one example, allowing foreign holidays this summer when it's patently obvious that back in 2020, travel abroad was instrumental in spreading infection into this country. The Cardiff outbreak following a planeload returning from Zante (Greek Islands) last August being a case in point....

[Workingman]

The Cardiff outbreak following a planeload returning from Zante (Greek Islands) last August being a case in point....

And therein lies the conundrum - can any country cut itself off from the rest of the world? No, not at all.

NZ is about as remote as you can get. Look at the steps it took. It went in hard, harder than most, yet even it is not Covid free. Nowhere is. So, do we stop all international travel till we kill this, or do we carry on as best we can and try to mitigate its impact?

For me this is with us in the long term, like flu, and we are going to have to learn to live with it. We either go annual tweaked vaccines for every strain, for everyone, everywhere, or we say "sod it, do your best, sunbeam". I am leaning towards the latter tbh.

[miasmum]

Works both ways though. My friends mum was in hospital for 8 weeks due to immobility and fluid on the lungs due to her longstanding COPD. She was discharged to a care home following two negative covid tests. In the home she was put on the isolation corridor, not allowed out of her room. Ten days later tested positive for covid, the only people she had seen were the staff.

She recovered thankfully, only three weeks later she suffered an exacerbation of her COPD, was readmitted to hospital, tested regularly every 3 days always negative. Sadly three weeks later she passed away, still negative. Cause of death

1 Covid 19
2 COPD

My friend queried this and apparently the covid 19 that she recovered from with pretty much her only symptom being a high temperature had weakened her system so she succumbed to the COPD that she was admitted with in the first place and readmitted to hospital with three weeks earlier. I am pretty sure, as is my friend she died from COPD

[Suff]

There will be an inquiry into the response to Covid in every country and they will all reach the same conclusion. No country in the world was really prepared for a worldwide pandemic. Despite all the policies and procedures, the modern world (and I do not call WW1 the modern world), has never seen a true pandemic before.

Everyone has learned something even If only that without a vaccine you simply do not stop a pandemic. The modern world is too open and too interconnected to allow that level of control.

I would hope that one lesson learned was that post Phase1 early release of vaccines like AZ could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Strict controls, to be sure and moderate ramp up, but early vaccine intervention.

Yes, there is always a risk with early vaccine release. But with, quite literally, millions dying around the world, a few thousand vaccine deaths, as we learn, is nothing in comparison. Harsh, but true.

Just look at the EU right now. There are a slew of reports, from within the EU itself, showing that an unwillingness to fast track process and an unwillingness to take a risk on cost and availability, has quite literally ushered in a 3rd wave of the virus.

Today, each day, multiple thousand of people are dying in the EU and it is going up, not down. It was avoidable but that will come out in the review.

As for holidays this summer.

It is a totally different situation to 2020. Back in the summer of 2020 we had no defence but isolation. Certainly it will be deemed a mistake to have taken the lull between waves 1 and 2 as an OK to go about our holidays close to normal. But it was not just the UK who did that, everyone was looking at the situation, the possibility of a second hard lockdown and the mental health of the population and decided to take a risk.

I, for one, after having lost my niece to cancer a year ago, was extremely grateful to be able to get my family here and exercise a bit of grief. It cost no spread of the virus because everyone was extremely careful, avoided planes and looked after their own health (therefore looking after everyone else's).

Lessons will be learned. The key question is whether they will be retained and government policy will be updated to reflect those lessons. Which is an entirely different beast.

[cruiser2]

When the doctor told us mrs.e had cancer he gave us a form. This said that if she died within 28 days the cause of death would be cancer.
There is no mention of Covid 19.
We had only been out of the house for food shopping and like fresh food, not pre-packed meat or veg.
A cousin and a friend came to visit while I went shopping on my own.
Towards the end carers and nurses came each day to keep mrs.e clean and comfortable.
We have ben self isolating since lockdown started last year. Have talked to some of the neighbours but have been social distancing.

We have said we would not go in a care home even before lockdown started.

[Workingman]

A pandemic is a pandemic, and when it is caused by a previously unknown vector we have to be quick, but cautious, in how we react. Lives will be lost either way.

We have dodged a bullet this time and we should be thankful for that. Some lives have been lost unnecessarily, perhaps; that's true, but imagine what it would have been like with a pandemic of Ebola or Marburg.

We need to stop beating ourselves up about this and just get on with trying to defeat it. All of this "we did better than you" stuff is bollocks. We all need to pull together.

[cromwell]

We need to stop beating ourselves up about this and just get on with trying to defeat it. All of this "we did better than you" stuff is bollocks. We all need to pull together.

I agree with that. Vaccinating populations isn't a sports event. When we're done we should help others and I think we will.
Some of the papers have been crowing re our success and it isn't right, somehow.