'I resigned three times' during pandemic, care home manager reveals on Caring View show

The uphill struggle facing care home managers who battled to keep residents safe for over a year against a “backlash” of complaints during the Covid pandemic, was laid bare in a new chat show last night with manager Dawn Bunter admitting “I think I resigned three times”.

Dawn Bunter is the care home manager at Iceni House in Norfolk and is a co-host of the new chat show The Caring View. She began her new role at the care home two weeks before the care home was closed in mid-February last year to protect residents from the coronavirus.

Soon after the home had an outbreak of ‘suspected’ Covid but there was no testing at the time.

Resident played dominoes but by afternoon ‘his lips were blue’

Dawn Bunter said: “I remember playing dominoes with one of our lovely residents at 9 o’clock in the morning and by half past one in the afternoon his lips were blue.”

Ms Bunter, who has worked in social care since 1996 - “the day I left school”- said: “We were told not to wear PPE because that wasn’t a requirement at the time and in the end we lost nine residents.”

Remembering having to call families up, having not yet met them, to tell them about their loved ones, she said: “It was the most horrendous time of my entire career.”

Referring to Health secretary Matt Hancock’s promise last year to throw a protective ring around care homes, Dawn Bunter said: “We were told there was this iron-clad ring that surrounded us, which we spent many months searching for.“

While some residents only got tested for the virus after being admitted into hospital with suspected Covid, Ms Bunter still couldn’t get any other residents or staff tested unless they were symptomatic.

She said: “You were walking around the building not knowing whether you had it. "The staff struggled with not knowing whether they were A, bringing it into the home…or if they were taking it home to their families. I think I resigned three times.

“I did feel quite alone with the visiting. When I first started having visits into the care home, I kind of felt I was the only one kind of breaking the rules and allowing people to come in and visit their families. It felt like I was getting a lot of support from you guys.”

'I certainly do feel that… I personally let everybody down’

The Caring View chat show is aired live on YouTube every Tuesday at 7.30pm.

Co-host Adam Purnell is care quality lead at Kepplegate House care home. Mr Purnell said the show was born from a need for the four managers co-hosting it (who have never met in real-life) to lean on each other for support in the last year in the absence of support from government and elsewhere.

Describing the first episode as a chance for the co-hosts to introduce themselves and their experiences as care home managers over the last year, Adam Purnell said the show also aims to highlight the good work of the care sector to the public and the media.

Mr Purnell said he and his co-hosts all shared a “genuine comraderie" adding "this genuine rapport that we’ve got with each other is incredible”.

“Although we are here tonight talking as industry leaders, as people do call us, our views and opinions are separate to the roles that we hold. They aren’t necessarily shared by our employers and we’re not here tonight representing them, we’re here representing ourselves and representing the sector.”

It has been described as a chat show akin to the TV chat show 'Loose Women' but for social care. Fellow co-host Donna Pierpont is a care home manager at Broomgrove Trust Nursing Home in Sheffield.

A qualified nurse with 27 years experience in care homes, she joked on the show: “I started in 1991 when Mark wasn’t even born.

’You three have been a brick to me’

“These other three people on the screen -who a year ago I would never have known who they are – we are literally from four different points in England. The strength that we’ve given each other and the friendship that we’ve made has made us want to do this and spread that friendship wider.”

Donna Pierpont said care home managers were receiving calls from hospitals in April 2020, “telling us we had a duty of care to the NHS to take admissions into homes”, but she says she had to be “very bold and strong”.

“I closed my doors and said I wouldn’t have anybody in. I managed to keep everybody safe for a year”.

Despite her efforts, Covid entered via a staff member. 13 staff and six residents tested positive.

“If it wasn’t for the vaccine it would have been a different story." She says it was purely down to “timing that actually everybody survived. It made me realise how easily it could get into the home. You could be the best manager…you could be doing everything to keep people safe and it can still get into the home.

Over a third of care managers considering leaving jobs

“I certainly do feel that…I personally let everybody down. In social care it has been very much on our individual heads and shoulders. You three have been a brick to me.”

More than one third (35 per cent) of care managers say they are considering leaving care and changing careers, reveals a recent survey of 113 UK care home managers in March 2021 by care tech firm Florence.

After a year working during the pandemic, half are 'overwhelmed and overworked', 18 per cent are 'completely burned out' and 63 per cent say they have inadequate mental health support at work.

The majority (51 per cent) are working 10+ hours more a week on Covid tasks, on top of their workload.

'I was apart from my family for 362 days'

Adam Purnell highlighted “little support” for care home managers for the first eight to nine months of the pandemic with care homes creating their own pandemic risk assessments with no input from the CQC etc. He highlighted how government, as late as last August, had said it was not going to do regular testing in care homes.

Mark Topps said managers had faced “a lot of backlash” from the public on Twitter and Facebook, with people emailing the care home, phoning the Care Quality Commission and making calls to safeguarding teams against care home managers’ actions.

Mark Topps, was until March the care home manager of Little Wakering House care home in Essex, but has since decided to change jobs to spend more time with his growing family and is now a regional support manager for London working in domiciliary care.

Mr Topps said: ”It was a tough place to be it was a lonely place to be. There wasn’t support for managers. It’s definitely brought a lot of managers and deputy managers together. There’s a lot more collaboration within the sector.”

To try to keep his family and residents Covid-free, Mr Topps' wife and three children moved out of the family home early last year and he decided to make a personal sacrifice and remained living alone for almost a year.

“I would have days where I would just drive to work and just cry. There are days when you think is it really worth all this?

“I was apart from my family …for 362 days.

"If I hadn’t had left the care home I would probably still be apart from them. The risk is still there. There are still people out there that are separated from the people they love. It’s definitely not heard enough within… the media.”

Join 'The Health and Social Care Club' on Clubhouse

Mark Topps is also the co-host of The Health and Social Care Club aired on Clubhouse every Wednesday at 7pm.

Clubhouse is an audio chat social media platform currently only available on Apple and is invite only.

The show currently has 179 members to date and today (Wednesday 14 April), Michael Corbett, event director of social care portfolio of CloserMedia will talk about the Care Show which is scheduled for October 2021.

To listen to The Health and Social Care Club click here

The Caring View chat show is now inviting people to share their expertise as guests on the new show.

The Caring View is aired live every Tuesday at 7.30pm on You Tube. To visit the YouTube channel click here.