Care home owner and husband were shocked at Mark Drakeford’s decision to send patients into care homes without Covid testing
Martin Shipton
The owner of a care home whose husband took his own life because of the pressure of coping during the pandemic says they had been shocked when then First Minister Mark Drakeford said patients would be released back into care homes from hospital without being tested for Covid.
Earlier Helen Hougn and her husband Vernon, who ran a care home in Wrexham, had been appalled when told that older people would not be ventilated if they caught the deadly virus.
‘Bed blocking’
She told the UK Covid Inquiry: “My response was to the local health board, was the only way I would accept any patients from the hospital, would be if they came with a written negative Covid swab, and I wanted it in writing that it was — it had come as a negative Covid swab. And the response I got was that that may not be possible to do that, and I said, ‘Well, they don’t come’ and therefore my response was that they were going to report me to Care Inspectorate Wales for bed blocking.”
She told them: “You can report me to whoever you want but nobody is setting foot over my nursing home without a Covid swab and they didn’t.”
Pressure
Mrs Hough, a member of the Covid Bereaved Families for Justice Cymru group, told the Inquiry: “I did say to the local health board, ‘I hope you’re not putting pressure on other homes like you are with me on managers, because managers may not be able to say ‘No, we’re not going to take people, or we’re not going to take people only with a negative swab.’.’If you’ve got a homeowner that’s got eight empty beds, then the owner may say, “We want them filled” regardless, whereas I had the choice to say, “No, they’re not coming into my home.” I’m not sure that every manager had that choice. I don’t know, but I did say that I hope they weren’t putting that pressure on them.”
She said pressure had been intense on her husband : “Unfortunately his workload increased dramatically because trying to get supplies in, he was having to queue at supermarkets and the cash and carry and things. Everything took so much longer. One day he came back and he’d been queueing at B&Q to get in for 2 hours for a ballcock to repair a toilet.
“Every single day this was.His workload did increase but also, what also affected him, but unbeknown to us, was he was watching this on the TV. Well, we both were. Every single day. There’s a rule in the house that we don’t normally put the TV on until 6 o’clock at night unless grandchildren were there. But this was in the morning until night. When we were watching what was developing every single day.
“And when Boris Johnson said they were going to test in care homes there was such a relief for us all to start being tested, and on that very same week, Mr Drakeford turned that around and said they won’t be doing it in Welsh care homes, in Wales, because he didn’t see … well in fact his words were the resources would be better spent elsewhere. And we just … we just sat back in the chair, and he just said to me “What do we do now?” And I said I don’t know. I don’t know. We just keep working.”
Distressing
Mr Hough saw people dying in the home in very distressing circumstances.
His wife told the Inquiry she tried to reassure her husband at various points, saying they would go on holiday..
But on May 21 2020, he said: ‘How are we going to go with this epidemic? With this pandemic? ‘And I said, ‘We put our gloves and masks on and we just go, we just go.”
“Then on the Thursday, he’d gone to work, as he’d gone to work, he’d even fed his patients, he’d fed his patients and I thought he’d gone shopping and then the police came and told me that unfortunately he’d been found in the police car and he’d shot himself, in the police car park, in the car.”
Baroness Hallett, who is chairing the Inquiry, expressed her deepest sympathy to Mrs Hough and said she had been exceptionally brave to give evidence.
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Drakeford needs to go to Prison, Gething too, honest to god they do…
Under what offence will Mark Drakeford and Vaughan Getting better sent to prison? Sounds like you want some Trumpian future for Wales.
Try murder most foul, read it again…
Don’t cough up the old “Trump” diversion. Some of the antics of Drakeford and Co during the Covid crisis would fit into the Trump playbook extremely well. In some respects J Ellis below sums it up well in that the Wales regime were a bit more honest and open than the Boris balls-up in England. But that was a low bar anyway. People who had close encounters with covid deaths brought about by cack handed management have every right to harbour extreme feelings about those who were in leadership positions.
The second wave took out my mate’s mum in a home that had withstood the first wave, that should not have happened!
On the whole, my sense was that Wales handled the pandemic rather better – or, at least, more honestly and frankly – than was the case in England.
But safeguarding the residents in care homes was an exception, because keeping them safe proved to be no more a priority – and in consequence was no more effective – here in Wales than was the case across the border.
And that was an unmitigated scandal.
Just because Drakeford and Gething were coached to appear calm and collected didn’t affect their ability to be very frugal with the truth…recall at one point Gething became angry and it was back to his coaching team for adjustment, hence it only happened the once…
I’d say that Drakeford, who did the vast majority of those televised Friday press conferences himself, was much more open and frank about the situation in Wales than were Hancock and his various successors and colleagues in respect of England.
As attested at the time, I remember, by political journalists as different as the presenters of BBC’s Good Morning, Britain and James O’Brien on LBC.
Care homes were a disaster across the UK and says a lot about how we treat our elderly, but ONS statistics suggest it was almost 50% worse in England than Wales: “In the first wave there were more total deaths of care home residents compared with the five-year average (26,035 and 1,046 excess deaths for England and Wales respectively)” [ONS] The population in England is about 18 times greater than Wales, so had England performed the same as Wales their excess deaths in care homes should’ve been about 18,000, not 26,000. And that’s before considering that Wales has a much… Read more »
That’s a significant point. Even so I still recall, in the fairly early days of the pandemic, hearing of a care home owner – from memory somewhere in Neath Port Talbot I think – reporting that they’d received a phone call to inform them that one of their residents who had been in hospital was now ready for discharge. The home owner asked if the resident would be tested for the virus before discharge, but was informed that as the coronavirus regulations didn’t require this to be done, it wouldn’t be done. The home owner responded that as his care… Read more »
It depends on the question. Should and could the Welsh Gov have done better? Absolutely, there’s a lot to learn for next time. But would Wales have been better off with Whitehall and Matt Hancock in charge as some conservative commentators like to imply? Not a chance.
I agree with that!
“But would Wales have been better off with Whitehall and Matt Hancock in charge”; this is a distraction. It can be argued that a charge for gross negligence manslaughter should be investigated by the Police.
Absolutely none of our politicians in government in these islands came out of the pandemic with total credit. But I think that it’s fair to say that some performed better than others.
It’s not a distraction when some folks are trying to use the pandemic as evidence that Wales can’t run its own affairs. This matters because there is likely to be a RefCon alliance attempt to reverse devolution in 2029. So everyone should know that care home excess deaths in the first wave were 50% higher in England.
And specifically on the point of discharging untested patients into care homes, Matt Hancock yesterday said this was the “least-worst” option, adding “nobody has yet provided me with an alternative that was available at the time that would have saved more lives”.
If you want to avoid Wales being ruled from a RefCon alliance, then make sure that there are no RefCon in our Senedd.
Secondly, ensure that there is a majority Plaid Cymru government to take us out of this UK pending disaster.
Well said.
Then there were certain GP’s who turned out to be abject cowards…why should they risk losing their good life…bitter…lemon trees mate…put the white wash brush away…
That unambiguously wasn’t the case with our own local GP practice. I take as I find.
Drakeford clearly treated older people as second class citizens not deserving of honest care – simply outrageous.
He sent Covid to where it could do most harm, without a care, the ‘angel of death’ and he needs to be treated as such…
The truth here is explained by ill informed panic. Panic that hospitals would be overwhelmed so the priority was to get as many as possible out and somewhere else – regardless of testing results or the availability of it. In this case, into care homes. Millions were also spent on hardly used nightingale hospitals (or not used at all). The question that needs to be asked is the evidence for concluding that hospitals would be overwhelmed. I suspect there isn’t any.
Presumably the need for the Nightingale hospitals was based on assumptions that the public wouldn’t actually stay at home to protect the NHS when asked.
I have no idea. Part of the reason I posed the question. If this inquiry is to serve any real purpose 5 years on (and the longer it goes on, the more I doubt it), then it needs to get to the reasons – good, bad or indifferent – why decisions were taken at the time, rather than retailing who said what to whom which seems to be the staple diet of the reporting recently.
Westminster has a long tradition of inquiries that drag on until those responsible have retired or died, and everyone has given up hope of anything improving. The whole point of them is to serve as talking therapy and not find fault with a perfect British state.
I suspect that the evidence which shaped the reaction was what happened in Bergamo in Lombardy, where coronavirus hit hard a short time before it reach our islands. I never heard any explanation as to just how the infection swiftly impacted so enormously on one rather limited and distinctly non-metropolitan area of northern Italy. But it did, and the hospital authorities in Bergamo opted to invite cameras in to record the enormity of what was happening. It wasn’t until I saw that filmed footage on Channel 4 News that I grasped the real significance of what had reached mainland Europe… Read more »
Local governments were not prosecuting Covid lockdown Breached . Port talbot was complicit along with the police not wanting to know.
Not my job