In Wales mysterious ‘decision-makers’ to blame for care home ‘genocide’

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From BBC Wales today:

Discharging untested patients to care homes during the Covid-19 pandemic was “a form of genocide”, a front-line doctor has said. Intensive care doctor Laura McClelland said three things still made her angry four years on from the start of the pandemic.

She added doctors had little option but to discharge patients as they struggled to “rustle up” carers who were willing to risk their lives for minimum wage jobs. She was speaking ahead of the UK Covid inquiry’s three-week visit to Wales, which begins on Tuesday.

Somebody must be responsible for those discharges then, who?

Well, in this lengthy BBC Wales report, the Labour Government don’t get a mention or a photo, nor does any Health Board member. Just this:

She is keen to hear decision makers explain why so much non-emergency healthcare was put on hold.

“We need to ask who is going to take true accountability for the impact that continues to have and that these decisions may very well have been the final nail in the coffin for the Welsh NHS.” https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1e11e909g7o

Is that it? What about the Welsh First Minister (Labour) or the Welsh Health Secretary (Labour)?

Surely they made the decision to discharge untested into care homes like they did in Scotland?

Yes, Anas Sarwar (Labour) from the same party I think as the Welsh First Minister said just last month at the Covid Inquiry in Scotland:

At the heart of this inquiry are the people who lost their lives and lost their loved ones – and so far they have been badly let down by the SNP circus playing out. One of the worst atrocities of the pandemic was the SNP government’s decision to allow untested and Covid-positive patients to be discharged into care homes.

Let me get this right now. In Wales it was genocide but Labour in Government didn’t do it. According to BBC Wales it was just those ‘decision-makers’.

In Scotland, according to Labour in opposition, it was the SNP. Don’t we have ‘decision-makers’ up here?

To be fair to all involved, it wasn’t the hospital discharges in Wales. We know for certain from ONS research, it was itinerant agency staff travelling between care homes spreading the disease.

Footnote:

Will Sarwar want to upgrade his atrocities to genocide now? No, wait, Gaza, he won’t be going there.

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19 thoughts on “In Wales mysterious ‘decision-makers’ to blame for care home ‘genocide’”

  1. Ah, but, that doctor’s name suggests she might be Scottish or of Scottish ancestry, and there is a McClelland Street in Govan, which is in Nicola Sturgeon’s constituency. So, clearly the Scottish Government has had involvement.

    Alasdair Macdonald

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  3. To be fair John, there is SOME evidence of ‘itinerant staff’ spreading the problem, but this was not the only mechanism – By way of personal example – I had visited my kids and grandkids in Scotland and England in January 2020, returning via Luton early February – I spent days in bed on return home totally unaware of what had felled me until the penny began to drop as news ramped up, somewhere along the way I’d met the virus…

    Despite efforts of media and politicians alike to divert and deflect attention, we must hold clear in our minds why this edict to empty hospitals into care homes arose – It was the recommendation of an expert committee in order for the NHS to cope with an inbound pandemic.

    We must also keep clear in our minds that the emergency legislation to instruct this originated in Westminster after weeks of dithering including ramping up testing capabilities – The legislation when it finally did come, spelled out very clearly that whether tested or untested those patients had to go.

    Mistakes were certainly made in realising the extent of the threat, but by far the most damaging of all was the dithering of ‘bloody stupid jonhson’ and the politics of #10 Downing Street.

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    1. If there must be blame then only the Scottish government got it completely and utterly wrong. The play acting in the mother of parliaments where labour pretends to be the opposition is so vastly different from HR where the unionist opposition actually bares its teeth and frequently draws blood. The only function of these unionists in the Scottish Parliament is to undermine every single thing our government does. It’s really the only thing they excel at.

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      1. NO , Scottish government did a good job , hampered by the usual , they are not allowed to make the rules , the rule book is written by Westminster so Scottish government always with one hand tied behind its back gets blamed for things it doesnt have control of

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    2. I read somewhere recently an analysis of which care homes had the most cases/deaths from Covid. This analysis showed it was mainly private care homes . One of the reasons for this seemed to be the shuffling of staff between care homes in the same group thus the staff taking the virus from home to home.

      The obvious example was the private care home on Skye where the manager travelled the length of the country to take up her post and the Staff were bussed in from the mainland. The Church of Scotland care home on Skye with staff from the island had few if any cases.

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      1. True in the Skye case, over which IIRC there was a legal confrontation on revoking licence to operate or similar.
        The ‘problem’ I saw was the artificial disconnect between care home ‘operators’ and the SG/NHS as part of the Tory dogma of ‘free enterprise’ versus “red tape”.
        This mindset is crucial to understanding what happened over the Grenfell accident was no mere accident waiting to happen, it is built in to the Tory psyche – denuding pandemic preparedness because it’s ‘wha… chance in a billion’, not funding gas storage as a ‘waste of money’.. The list is almost endless over Tory and Tory perceptions of risk, as the public have no choice but pay for their political myopia.
        PFI from the 1980s for instance.

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    3. Bob, there is though a structural issue to this which the media ignore, though the inquiry may unearth it.

      Think back to February 2020, just before the pandemic broke. At that stage certainly the WM government was effectively becalmed, doing nought and probably hoping on developing herd immunity among the population. At the same time the NHS, in all parts of the UK, would be going through the normal “winter crisis” with our hospitals filled with the elderly and those with respiratory conditions.

      In parallel news broadcasts were showing how things were going in France and Italy in particular.Eventually this made clear that doing nothing was not an option, that action had to be taken to prevent our health care systems meeting a similar, if not worse, fate. Hence the lockdown. But at the same time it was clear that the hospitals were going to need to take large numbers of covid patients – remember Branson’s involvement in getting more respirators in place? – so what to do with the patients who were in hospital now? This was especially true for those still in hospital but couldnt be discharged as no care package was in place for them, but basically any patient not at death’s door was considered necessary for discharge into care outside of hospital. For the elderly this was often a place in a care home.

      Therefore the structural issue face by government was that space had to be created in hospitals for a major health emergency, but, as the hospitals were full already, what to do with those already in hospital. Care homes were part of that solution to the extent that the default was to discharge a patient to a care home unless they showed symptoms of covid. That was the extent of the desperation.

      However, why not test? Testing was hardly rocket science. The tests supplied to the public had, let’s say, a wide margin of error, but there were other more accurate tests available, but capacity to have his done in professional labs had been cut right down (and didnt catch up till May or June). So not testing, not only maximised hospital beds for the expected tsunami of covid cases, but was necessary because WM (whose responibility it was to the entire UK) had cut back testing capacity to such a degree. Double whammy.

      Therefore to an important degree, this wasnt about who took a decision, but who woke up to smell the coffee and realise that tranferring the elderly out of hospitals was functionally essential to create hospital capacity. There was though another reason.

      Where do you think an old person had more chance of catching Covid? In a care home, whether from a care assistant or another new resident just out of hospital? In a hospital, which by the end of March was heaving with folk with”the virus”? My money is on the latter.

      So for everyone’s sake the hospitals had to be emptied to ensure that anyone with Covid and needing hospital admission could secure this. At the same time, those sent to a care home probably had a less bad likelihood of catching the virus (not none, not good, but lesser

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      1. the covid was brought into care homes by staff , care homes were hit with staff shortages people going off sick with covid the care homes then started bringing in relief staff from agencies these staff travelled the length and breadth of the uk and unsurprisingly brought and spread covid far and wide this has already been proven with a previous enquiry , the extent to which patients from hospitals into care homes brought covid with them compared to agency staff travelling far and wide is one to ponder but we will never know which spread most disease.Covid being the way it is you can actually have it for several days even a fortnight and test negative for it during that time so testing before discharge from hospital to a care home was no exact science nor was testing incoming staff , what was needed was a third option , accept that in a pandemic all you can do is minimise the movement of people , it takes only one patient with covid moving from a hospital to a care home to set the ball rolling for wveryone in the care home to get infected and only one agency member of staff to move to a care home to set the ball rolling to infect everyone in that care home.The enquiry should concentrate on the areas we could have stopped the spread of covid such as banning flights in and out of uk and banning tourism and non essential travel in and out of uk by ferry and banning stupid government funded ideas like eat out to help out , these would have been a good start rather than trying to blame hospital patients and staff who were desperately trying to keep us alive.

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        1. no disagreement with any of that. My point was that these things had to happen -there was no alternative. Hospitals lacked the capacity to deal with the “winter crisis” (they always do) AND the pandemic (they never could). The only thing that might have helped would have been more testing capacity right from the start, but that, like much else in the public sector had been cut to the bone.

          Thus, since many elderly stuck in hospital without a care package (often a care home or care staff in and out of their homes, so likely to produce a similar result) could only be cared for in care homes, or left in arguably even more risk in hospitals stuffed with Covid patients, the only thing might have been more testing to identify the symptom free but infectious.That though had been undermined by budget cuts.

          That said, all you say is right, but what is more worrying its being used for political ends when decisions up to 10 years earlier meant putting old people into care homes was inevitable in the circumstances.

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      2. I largely agree, but the problem was exacerbated by omnipotence of #10 and an incumbent PM whose sole concerns were conceit and political advantage whatever cost to the populace.
        Had #10 taken decisive action on foot of expert advice on what was unfolding in Italy etc., the UK as whole and Scotland in might have been in a better place.
        IIRC the entire pandemic preparedness package along with ventilators was sold off to Singapore or Malaysia or similar, and ‘gor blimey’ it worked, handsomely.
        We have some re-crafting to do over pandemic preparedness, but it is the power of the government of the day and the idiot of the time who occupies the ‘hot seat’ we must address – We must never face another ‘Let the bodies pile high…” event again.

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  5. Wasn’t bed blocking the issue? A sunami of seriously ill covid cases would die without hospital care. Our lack of elderly care facilities either by home care or residential care homes led to this. If the hospital patients tested positive but not seriously ill their beds might be needed for worse cases. At the time this awful decision had to be taken and our lack of joined up health care was exposed. Has it improved.

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    1. Bed blocking has long been an issue for hospitals, but it became an urgent issue with an incoming pandemic, hence the ‘draconian’ legislation.

      It is monetisation under the ‘privatisation’ drive which fragmented elderly care and created the disconnect with the NHS across the UK, it was built into the business model.

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    2. an enquiry has already concluded that it was private care homes that caused most covid deaths in care homes in Scotland those ran by the council or church were safer no surprise there , some of the biggest private care home companies in Scotland have since sold up and moved on but i wouldnt be surprised if theyve moved on to another type of business that they can suck the life out of.

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  6. If you declare a pandemic it makes sense to at the very least test people arriving in your country by air or by sea even better just stop incoming and outgoing flghts until it all calms down and is under control , but you need common sense to do that and as we know common sense is not common especially in Westminster .Instead of stopping flights and ferries bringing people into the UK Westminsters Sunak came up with another idea” EAT OUT TO HELP OUT ” what an absolute idiotic idea that was and of course once your government is seen to be ignoring safety measures and you recognise that their policy is actually knowingly killing people you find those in society who also have a dark uncaring attitude to their neighbours friends relatives and community in general and will also turn their nose up at safety measures especially if they can make more money even it means putting peoples life at risk , there was no shortage of takers , loads of businesses government run and private carried on as if covid didnt exist plenty of business owners kept their restaurants bars hotels shops going throughout the worst days of covid , it has to be said that a lot of them didnt put themselves in danger oh no , they themselves ” worked from home ” it was the lower paid the expendable staff they were happy to put at risk .Now we have a covid enquiry , one that will go the same way that the rest before them have gone when everyone knows the actual government were to blame when everyone knows the governments policies killed people and much of the public copied those uncaring policies , what we will see is an enquiry result that blames those who were not to blame and exonnerates those who were to blame.

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