Care leaders reject government claim of 'protective ring' around care homes at start of pandemic

Care leaders have rejected Matt Hancock’s claims the government threw a ‘protective ring’ around care homes at the beginning of the pandemic, saying "it was chaotic, care settings were not protected or shielded and suffered terribly as a result".

The health secretary is facing increasing pressure over his treatment of care home residents despite telling a Downing Street press conference last Thursday that “right from the start we have tried to throw a protective ring around our care homes”.

In the press conference, the health secretary also claimed for the first time, that the government did not have the testing capacity at the start of the pandemic saying it “wasn’t possible” to test all hospital patients sent to care homes.

Mike Padgham, chair of Independent Care Group (ICG) said: "The sector was ignored and suffered terribly as a result.

“It was like being thrust into a wartime scenario with no clear plan of attack or survival.

“The Government advice at first was to proceed as normal, but many care settings locked down much earlier than they were subsequently advised to.

“After years of neglect and under-funding, care settings were exposed and vulnerable to something like coronavirus and the outcome was devastating.”

’Managers are terrified of the consequences of outbreaks in a care home’

It also emerges Matt Hancock was sent an e-mail on March 26 2020, asking for routine tests before discharging hospital patients into care homes.

In the leaked email sent to The Sunday Times, Lisa Lenton, chairwoman at the time of the Care Provider Alliance, told the health secretary: “Fear and anxiety are becoming a significant factor amongst the workforce, exacerbated by a lack of personal protective equipment.

“Current challenges being extensively reported across all parts of social care include: Care providers being pressured to take hospital discharge patients who haven’t been tested, some of whom are symptomatic. Managers are terrified of the consequences of outbreaks in a care home where the residents are currently asymptomatic.”

Sam Monaghan, chief executive of MHA, told Times Radio: “Obviously you had the pressure from the NHS, which we quite understood in terms of real concerns about them being overwhelmed.

“But there’s no way that you can take people into care homes who aren’t tested – it is like putting kind of a live explosive into a box of tinder.”

’We do not, and probably will never know, the extent of the damage… the practice of discharge without testing delivered’

Meanwhile, latest figures from the Office for National Statistics say 32,154 people died from Covid-19 in care homes in England and Wales between 28 December 2019 and 14 May 2021.

However, on the day Dominic Cummings told MPs Mr Hancock’s claim was “complete nonsense,” a new report from Public Health England (PHE) stated there were a total of 43,398 care home residents identified with a laboratory-confirmed positive COVID-19 test result resulting in 286 deaths.

The report states: 'The impact of suspected hospital associated seeding on care home outbreaks appears to be relatively small, potentially contributing to 1.6 per cent of all care home outbreaks. Time trend analysis shows that most of these outbreaks were concentrated at the early point of the pandemic, March to April 2020.'

The National Care Forum has analysed the link between hospital discharges and outbreaks in care homes calling the “partial picture” “unhelpful” and claims the testing done at that time were "fundamentally flawed".

Vic Rayner, chief executive of the National Care Forum (NCF) said: “The PHE report delivers an unhelpful analysis of data that provides at best a partial picture and at worst an unrecognisable representation of the impact that hospital discharge in the absence of testing had on the most vulnerable members of our society.

“The data attempts to almost completely absolve the discharge programme from ‘seeding’ outbreaks within homes by presenting a set of data as complete, when in fact it was fundamentally flawed because of the very limitations of the testing regime in both hospitals and care homes.

“To take this partial data and use it to assert that the lack of testing of those leaving hospital and entering care homes was a relatively small factor in the ‘seeding’ of outbreaks within homes runs the risk of rewriting an element of history to suit a current narrative.”

The government’s official guidance was not updated until April 15 where the Department of Health and Social Care introduced a policy of testing all those being discharged from hospitals into care homes.

Ms Rayner added: “In reality, the low level of testing for symptomatic patients or residents, and the complete absence of testing for asymptomatic people can only mean that we do not, and probably will never know, the extent of the damage that the practice of discharge without testing delivered.”

To read the report published by Public Health England, click here