Shocked about death in care homes **MNHQ content warning**

[happyandsingle]

Just this.Cannot believe how care home residents and staff have been thrown to the wolves.
Everything focused on the NHS it's like the elderly didnt matter.
Feel ashamed how we treat our elderly and even if the government act now in my opinion it's to late as to many lives have been lost.
To think the goverment need to be held accountable for this.

The PHE original guidance to care homes was completely wrong and flew in the face of basic public health infection control, known about for generations.. as i said Chris Whitty warned of this and was ignored.

The PHE advice changed when politicians reacted to public concern, which to be frank is what this govt has done since the outset of this crisis

Councils have had their budgets slashed over the years thats one of the reasons contributions low. I am a nurse in a Nursing Home. I have worked in lots(used to be agency). My manager is fantastic and thats why I stay. However,it could all change. The owners are pushing for the 2 v acant beds to be filled....they dont care who by. So we could have a person who invades other peoples privacy,bites etc..and will be i.possible to isolate for 2 weeks! My manager is standing firm but has said she will resign if forced to do this. Privately funded beds can be 1k a week. Council funded 400ish a week. We have 2 residents where their money has 'run our'..unless the families can affird top up fees of 800 a month they will have to go elsewhere. We have 4 carers and one nurse on a 12.5 hour shift..and 34 residents. Some with dementia,learning disability,fragile in bed. We have one paper mask each to wear for the whole shift.

It’s not only in the UK. Sweden is the same, if not worse. They’re even refusing them oxygen and are told to “open the windows” instead and overdose on morphine rather than give oxygen.

My very much loved father died last week from the virus in his care home. It is an area with very low rates of the virus andbyet he was number 11 to die and I know more have died since.

I hated that home for several reasons but in this instance I don’t blame the staff or the owners. It was and is, the perfect storm. Unsuitable buildings, extremely frail and vulnerable clients and an overwhelming infection rate.

I now feel deeply concerned for the staff who will be utterly traumatised by this and, of course, have risked their lives to care for our loved ones to the end. I was very fortunate to get one FaceTime call just before the end and I can confirm there was no gasping, no struggle, no ghastly suffering. Not in our case anyway. Dad just slipped away. It was peaceful. Unless I’d seen that I would never have believed it.

My thanks to those doing this work.

It's true that they are testing all people who are being discharged to care homes - that was the headliner. The caveat that they forgot to add was that it doesn't mean that if the person tests positive they won't be discharged to a care home, it's just that the care home will know they're positive. That is certainly, rightly or wrongly, what is happening in my trust. The issue that I have with this, is that whilst care homes do accept people with other infectious diseases, I do not think that we understand this virus enough to be taking this approach. I've watched as our homes, one by one, are reporting multiple residents testing positive, and usually there's a strong correlation between positive patients being discharged to their care.

I also do fail to believe that hospitals knowingly discharged infectious patients.

Not all positive patients are infectious. If you are infected and survive you are at very low risk. You can test positive and still have a cough but not be infectious from a week to 10 days after temp has come down. The known positives were not the issue.

What actually happened is that asymptomatic patients who had not been tested were discharged and some may have been positive.

Care homes, as private businesses can and do refuse to take residents back all the time for any reason they choose. How can hospitals'force' them? We can't and we didn't

There were higher fees being paid and usual funding processes to ensure best value were suspended. Care homes agreed to accept residents from hospital because they are not financially viable with empty beds.

Care homes as private businesses can't blame this on government or the NHS

This thread is a bit mad. This is a virus which was known to disproportionately produce severe effects in the elderly. Anyone in a care home is, by default, extremely frail and requiring care, it was always going to be on impossible for those people to completely isolate. Deaths are common in care homes even without covid.

‘They’re even refusing them oxygen and are told to “open the windows” instead and overdose on morphine rather than give oxygen.’

Morphine is significantly more effective for end of life dyspnoea than oxygen therapy which is generally ineffective and can increase agitation and distress in an already distressed patient.

Perhaps you should stop and think before posting such bullshit?

I'm not surprised Covid has spread like wild fire once it gets into homes tbh,s lot of people in Nursing/Care Homes will have Dementia and however hard the staff might try to isolate patients and social distance them people with dementia often get confused and go walkabout I worked in a Nursing home in the early 90,s before I began my nurse training and it was badly paid and badly funded them so this is not a new thing

the testing has not been available.
but even still, you could be negative one day and positive the next.

it is the care assistants dying that I feel sorry for. of course the nurses too.

Care homes and unpaid carers too.

At no point have the government recognised or even paid lip service to the extra work, stress and strain of unpaid carers who have given their lives up, some of us 24/7, to care for someone else even before this.

It was bad enough before, but at least I could grab an hour or two when my neighbour could sit with my relative so I could get a breather at the supermarket (!) or post something or just generally be away from the house. Now there's no escape until at least mid July as we are shielding too.

I think it's something like 39p per hour of carers allowance. It's insulting. £67 something per week.

(and if you're a longterm carer like me in carers allowance you don't get the 20 per week rise that one in Universal Credit does)

We have been abandoned completely (not a new thing) and forgotten about.

Care homes as private businesses can't blame this on government or the NHS

So we let people with a highly contagious disease into the (regulated) care home sector and its "no ones fault" ?

As i said earlier, basic infection control was ignored, Whitty warned the govt.
The only conclusion is this was a deliberate policy to reduce the elderly in the community.

It is very difficult with 10,000 care homes. My parents wisely stayed in their house until they died (literally in their house of 50 years) which is a much nicer way to go. My twins used to go a local care home every year to give a christmas performance with their trumpet, french horn and the choir and it is pretty grim in there - God's waiting room although obviously many have no choice and are better off than at home. only 1 in 5 people need a care home. Where possible try to be in the 4 in 5 who don't need one. At the best of times they are never that great to be in.

Luckily my parents died in their 70s so the chances of my needing a care home are pretty slim. Perhaps I should take up paragliding if I make it to 80 to see me off before things are too bad.

‘only 1 in 5 people need a care home. Where possible try to be in the 4 in 5 who don't need one’

Could you share the source for this please?

EricaNernie Wed 29-Apr-20 09:34:07
it is the care assistants dying that I feel sorry for. of course the nurses too.
so fuck the vulnerable people who are dying. no wonder the government have got away with this.

I also do fail to believe that hospitals knowingly discharged infectious patients.

They don't have a choice. Here is the hospital discharge guidance:

www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-hospital-discharge-service-requirements

1.1 This document sets out the Hospital Discharge Service Requirements for all NHS trusts, community interest companies and private care providers of acute, community beds and community health services and social care staff in England, who must adhere to this from Thursday 19th March 2020. It also sets out requirements around discharge for health and social care commissioners (including Clinical Commissioning Groups and local authorities).

1.2 Unless required to be in hospital (see Annex B), patients must not remain in an NHS bed.

1.3 Based on these criteria, acute and community hospitals must discharge all patients as soon as they are clinically safe to do so. Transfer from the ward should happen within one hour of that decision being made to a designated discharge area. Discharge from hospital should happen as soon after that as possible, normally within 2 hours

These are requirements not suggestions. The image is the list of criteria from Annex B for those who are required to be in hospital. Everyone else must be discharged, infectious or not.

Therefore staff are all on minimum wage and get very little training. Staff turnover is very high. And yet people moan about how unfair it is to have to sell their homes to pay for care and resisted a tax to pay for care. A further example where people expect something for nothing ie a hard job to be done to a high standard but for no money and they should not have to pay.

@WokeUpSmeltTheCoffee: thank you. One of the most sensible contributions on this thread.

I’m wondering how many of the people posting on the regular ‘why should my mum have to sell her house to fund care, she’s worked all her life and what about my inheritance‘ threads are now raging about what they consider to be inadequate underfunded care homes. And are, naturally, unable to see the problem with holding both of those views simultaneously.

Lemon, I will look it up. I remember it from when the Tories proposed and then dropped their scheme to try to resolve the issue of care home costs etc (dubbed dementia tax) - it was interesting that most people would not need that care (remember plenty are looked after by a spouse at home until they die, loads are independent at home anyway and plenty die far too young as it is and people were quoting studies that this massive extra tax is a bit unfair on the many who won't need a care home anyway. Also some cultures in the UK like my immediate Indian neighbours live with the husband's parents all their lives and don't use care homes in most cases.

I'm not shocked at the numbers, it's been widely known for weeks that Covid deaths in the community and residential homes have been missed off the official numbers, and that these were quite high. I'm so glad that my granddad died long before all this - I would have been heartbroken at the thought of him cooped up in his room with no visitors, and not understanding why because of his dementia. I try not to think about the number of residents experiencing the same thing, it's just overwhelming.

Nobody has said it here so I will but have you stopped to think that SOME elderly people, be they are in care homes or being cared for in the community might actually want to die? That being douby incontinent and bedbound with a severely compromised quality of life is not the end of life that they want? While I of course think that care workers should be properly equipped and supported, there are still some people who chose and should have the right to chose quality of life over longevity. There's a bigger picture here being largely ignored among all the hysteria and outrage.

Wow much lower than I thought 3.2%. I thought it was about 1 in 5.

"3. Residents of care homes; 2001 to 2011

In 2011, more than a quarter of a million (291,000) people aged 65 and over were living in care homes in England and Wales, representing 3.2% of the total population at this age. This number has remained almost stable since 2001 when 290,000 people were living in care homes, representing a slightly higher proportion, 3.5% of the population aged 65 and over at that time. Increases in the usual resident population of England and Wales have outstripped changes in the resident care home population. At age 65 and over, the resident care home population grew by just 0.3% between 2001 and 2011 compared to an overall increase of 11.0% in the usual resident population; see table 1.

www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/ageing/articles/changesintheolderresidentcarehomepopulationbetween2001and2011/2014-08-01

My Mum is in a care home; she is under 70 and @NoIDontWatchLoveIsland, she is not extremely frail. She has dementia and as such requires 24 hour care which is why she is there. It's a bit low to basically say, they're all there to die anyway, so why the need for the thread?

I've never been that satisfied with the care she receives there but we had no choice; they were basically the only home that would take her. But the communication from the home has been shocking during this time. I have no idea what's going on.

I know that they're not testing residents. One worker has told me (privately) that there have been numerous deaths in the home but this hasn't been communicated to me at all.
i understand that it's hard, I understand that they are under an enormous amount of pressure but I rely on them to talk to me about my Mum who doesn't have the capacity to communicate with me herself. It is terrifying leaving her fate in other people's hands, particularly when I don't trust them to begin with. Mum's care costs over £8k per month. I don't feel I am asking for much to hear from the home once a week for an update on my mum's health and the situation within the home.
i have all the sympathy for the care staff and am so, so grateful to them for going in to such a terrifying, exposed environment but the management of the home have fallen apart.

Their lockdown measures are to keep all residents in their rooms at all times. My heart just breaks at the thought of my mum in her room alone.

I know this has turned into a rant- and I am sorry! It's just shattering me and I feel so guilty that mum is there at all.

Why isn't the government recording all deaths? What is their agenda? Are they expecting people to forget? Give them a false sense of security.
The Coronvirus death toll in the UK surprises me daily considering lots are not isolating, schools open to an extent, the spead in London. If the real figure of care residents, care workers, bus drivers, civilians dying gasping for breath thinking it is best to stay home not overwhelm the medical staff until their lips go blue. The low number makes sense with so many excluded.

@samcro,
i am not fucking the elderly but this virus is and I agree with many others, not all can be saved, no where in the world, you have heard the stories in spain and italy?