To ask what NHS frontline staff think of Breathtaking?

[CloudyYellow]

I have watched all 3 episodes. I worked on the frontline during Covid. I found it very triggering and my fury is back.

Truly sobering. Thank you for all you did ThePure. Humbled.

Well, we had large warehouses of expensive stuff that was unsuitable and will need to be destroyed, so your cost argument doesn’t hold up.

It would have been better to have had a large, central, constantly replenished stock holding of compliant gear that was then used as rotating stock for “peacetime”. Yes, there would be a bit of wastage because of the need to hold excess stocks, but if done correctly and short shelf life stock donated to care homes etc. there would be minimal waste. And there would be sufficient PPE for a future pandemic.

But that would have required long term, risk based thinking from experts in infection prevention and logistics, and your Tory mates don’t understand anything except short term politicking and making a fast buck from the public.

I’ve been meaning to watch.

I work in childcare and that was scary at first, especially as staff were complying with all rules but we were watching parents drop off their kids with us then going for coffee at each other’s houses etc. We had covid deniers, refusing to wear masks at drop off, getting cross if we sent children home with temperatures. A teacher from my children’s school died from it and I remember being so angry at these people not taking it seriously.

I can’t even begin to imagine the horror of being on the wards and dealing with it all then reading the comments of conspiracy theorists.

Tell me you know nothing about social care and hospital discharges without telling me you know nothing.

1. people are not “automatically barrier nursed” in noro and similar outbreaks. Who told you that?
2. residential care homes are not required to have medical staff on site, they provide social care as per their CQC registration. The guidance around PPE and isolation changed frequently, especially as the beginning. If medical staff were unclear, you can be damn sure social care staff were equally unclear.
3. care homes with LA funded residents could not - and cannot - refuse residents to return without breaking their contractual obligations. Hospital beds were filling up with patients who needed medical care. Do you really think people would have sat back and allowed medically fit people to remain in a bed unnecessarily? The amount of funding put in place to discharge patients quickly was like nothing I have ever seen.
4. have you ever been inside a dementia care home? Have you ever met a person with advanced dementia? Many of them don’t understand PPE or isolating. I suppose you could have put them all on 1:1 care but who is funding this and where are the care staff coming from?
5. the privately run homes could not get access to PPE! Don’t you think they tried? Their employees were dying at a high rate. They didn’t sit back and think “eh well never mind”.

Care homes have many residents in their own rooms. They should've used strict infection control measures for hospital transfers. Even if phe suggested no issue with spread if I'd been a manager or owner I'd have erred on the side of caution.

Janiie how would you have done that? Surely you understand that dementia patients have an urge to wander? My close relative was in a care home with a learning disability wing. Some residents were in their 30s and 40s and fully mobile despite severe learning disabilities. Early in the pandemic that care home lost 15 residents to covid after a patient was admitted from hospital who tested positive 24hrs later. 15 deaths ie 25% of the entire home. A devastating loss for both their families and the staff.

They all had single rooms but as a care home manager how would you propose to isolate them unsupervised in their bedrooms? Lock bedroom doors? Sedate them?

You know who has responsibility for planning and preparing for potential pandemics, including holding stocks of equipment or other supplies that may be needed? Even if that means spending a lot of money on those stocks, and having to discard items that cannot be used?

The government, and the DHSC operating on behalf of the government.

You know who doesn't have that responsibility?

Care homes.

Yes yes we know Gov has responsibility. My point being these rich care home owners driving about in Jags, paying their staff peanuts and and putting their hands up saying 'not our fault!' Really need to up their game a bit too don't they?

Sadly, the demographic of care home residents meant they were always going to be the highest risk. Care home owners need to work with their partners and do better planning and preparedness wise going forward.

I found it very triggering, it brought back all the fear and despair of that time. Plus the bloody stupid clapping which is somehow meant to be a suitable substitute for, you know, actually paying us what we're worth😡

I agree that care home staff should be paid more.

But it doesn't matter how rich the owners are, it's still not their responsibility to stockpile for pandemics. Your precious tory government dropped the ball on that one. And it was also your precious tory government that was at the top of the decision making chain that ordered covid patients to be discharged into care homes.

'And it was also your precious tory government that was at the top of the decision making chain that ordered covid patients to be discharged into care homes'

You do know every country did the same not just those run by Precious Tories? Hospitals were about to be inundated with infected patients and you seriously think vulnerable people, clinically ready for discharge should have just sat in the wards for a few weeks until testing was available?! It was the lesser of the 2 evils, get them out to what should have been a safer place.

This government pushed discharges very hard - without a plan in place - and caused a care home catastrophe. It wasn’t only the elderly, many care home staff died too. I’m sure if they were your colleagues, you’d get it. You’re not seeing the problems came from the top. Also not all care home owners are rich. Many care homes closed because they were no longer financially viable due to all the deaths of their residents. This meant a huge upheaval for the remaining residents too. It was a mess that we are still addressing in 2024.

'This government pushed discharges very hard - without a plan in place'

Every government did the same! Those clinically ready for discharge were discharged both to protect them from the surge of infected people being admitted and also to make space for those requiring hospital care.

What should they have done? Kept everyone in for a month when they'd inevitably have got it in hospital anyway?! It was a no win situation. They should havd had a better chance in a care home than in an acute hospital setting.

I see you are still defending the government.
Discharging patients to an empty care home night have made sense. But they did not do that. They discharged people to any care home that would take them meaning that people already living in care homes were infected and died.
They provided no PPE to care homes, and suppliers to care homes could not get PPE.
The government admitted at one point they had not realised that care workers often worked in more than one care home, so they carried covid from one home to another.
It made no sense. The reality was the government was prepared to sacrifice elderly people, for the sake of younger people who were taken into hospital.
It was never about protecting elderly people.
And no other countries did not do the same. I still remember Italy publicising how someone aged 99 recovered from covid in ICU in Italy. In the UK that 99 year old would never have been given an ICU bed.

A care home near me had about half of its residents die during the pandemic. A friends mum who lived there died of covid. She had been living in there and patients discharged from hospital brought covid into the home. It was predicted at the time this would happen in many care homes, the government did not listen as they did not care. They just talked bollocks about throwing a protective ring around care homes, and in reality that was simply a slogan.

And even when hospitals were pretty sure a patient had covid, they were instructed not to tell care homes. Because the government knew care homes would not accept discharged patients who were known to probably have covid.

It is also clear from the comments you have made on this thread that you have zero understanding of how care homes work. Just like the government then.

It was the same with the government guidelines for state schools. It was clear whoever wrote them had no knowledge of state schools and had probably only been in private schools. They had no knowledge of how small classrooms are in the state sector and that pupils are already squashed in. Many of the guidelines were physically impossible to do.

We're going to watch it tomorrow night. My eldest dd is a night worker in a nursing home & she said watching it brought back loads of memories.
I know I'll find it hard. Both of my parents got hospitalised in December 2020. We was able to call my mum every day & thankfully she was OK.
My dad was deaf so we couldn't speak to him & where his oxygen levels kept dropping he got really confused. It absolutely tears me up thinking my darling dad must have thought we'd all abandoned him (mum got taken in a week after dad) & no-one wanted to visit him. By the time we did he was on palliative care so wasn't aware we was there. We couldn't see his body or get chance to say goodbye before his funeral & after the funeral I had to leave my mum as wasn't in her bubble.
I fukn hate this government, as far as I'm concerned my dad's death is on Johnson along with every else who sadly died.

Haven't read the full thread yet, but I can echo what I have read so far. I have watched the first episode and had to stop. I am not NHS but was supporting thousands of students at a uni which went into lock down. The sense of fear and anguish was unrelenting for all of the staff and the stress of trying to support the students, especially international students who had no option but to stay in the UK due to travel bans and lockdowns in their own countries. A lot o my colleagues crumbled under the weight of it, and we were not front line NHS staff, so I can only imagine how much more stressful, terrifying and tragic is must have been for you all. We were part of a local group - firefighters, the police and council workers who came together to try and support our communities, and I will never forget a discussion about body bags by the fire service. Horrendous.

As I said, I have had to stop after one episode - I cried nearly all the way through it.

Thank you to the NHS staff - you saved thousands of lives, and saw out those who didn't survive with the most dignity that you could offer. ❤️

What???

Its the Governments job to have contingency plans for a pandemic, the PPE required for a influenza pandemic is the same for CV ie masks, aprons and hand gels.
The Govt ran these stocks down.

Analysis of official financial data suggests £325m was wiped off the value of the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) emergency stockpile, reducing it from £831m in 2013 under the Conservative-led coalition government to £506m by March last year

and

Accounts suggest funding for “stockpiled goods” that are “held for use in national emergencies” was increased between 2008 and 2011, when pandemic preparedness was identified as a national priority for the NHS. But since 2013 the value of the stockpile has fallen

They didn't at all, the death rate in UK CH's is way higher than other comparable countries.

This is down to our crumbling CH estate i.e shared toilet and washing facilities, residents and staff cannot help but mix.... far fewer hospital beds and staff compared to almost all other European countries.

We see it now in Cancer Care, we don't have staff or the scanners, hence our cancer outcome rates are terrible.

'This is down to our crumbling CH estate i.e shared toilet and washing facilities, residents and staff cannot help but mix..'

The owners should reinvest the massive fees that they charge in improving facilities! They charge a fortune, have shit facilities snd pay carers peanuts. Is that Johnson's fault too?

In his 2019 manifesto, Boris Johnson promised to ‘fix the crisis in social care once and for all'

He lied

non NHS. Just on the final episode now. It’s shocking watching. Very good how they show the Downing Street briefings against the reality in the hospitals. Anyone who works frontline needs a medal. Truly heroic.

Not all care homes have rich owners.

My DM lived in a not-for-profit home paying about £800 pw. LA residents paid less. We fund-raised for a new roof. Residents’ families built a Covid-safe meeting pod.

Well, the Tories have been in for 14 years, why haven't they regulated to change this?

Yes fees are super high but CHs are closing and those that are left are refusing to take complex patients.

My DDs care agency she worked for was/is handing back council and CH contracts, just not profitable.

Have you any idea how much it would cost to transform a Victorian house into a facility with on suite? and where would the patients go whilst building work done???

You re not thinking this through.

@Janiie Firms that make PPE contacted the government wanting to help the NHS. One large firm offered to make extra PPE at cost. They said no one ever returned their calls. Because the government were too busy giving out large contracts to firms run by their friends who had never made PPE, and in lots of cases made PPE that could not be used as it did not meet the requirements.
Yes I blame the government for that. There may still not have been enough PPE, but there could have been a lot more if the government had acted in the best interests of the public, instead of their friends.

The hugely popular wealthy care home owners swanning around in Jags are largely a myth. Most care homes are owned by big faceless groups like Excelcare. I guess their shareholders are probably swanning around in Jags but it's not like all the wealth is vested in one person.

In London and the SE where property prices are high it is possible to make a tidy profit in the care home industry as house prices support high fees. In the rest of the U.K. there is very little money in it at all. Average fees in 2022/3 were £686 per week in the North to £955 per week in the South. It might sound like a lot but could you rent a place with all your bills and food included for that and 24hr care support as well? Most residents (60%) are local authority funded and the LAs pay rock bottom fees that barely cover costs. When care home owners in the East of England lobbied Norfolk council for a raise in the basic rate they showed that the rate the LA paid for residential care was actually less than to stay in a Travelodge without even any breakfast let alone any care support.