Why was there no contingency plans for the disabled? Care homes etc?

[Cherryghost]

Following the sad story of the man who was disabled who starved to death who followed the instructions to stay at home and starved.
Why was there no contingency plans for checking in on disabled people?
Why was care home guidance ridiculous in the case of pandemics?
I think it said in April they didn't need PPE nor were people tested before being sent to care homes in the height of a pandemic.

It really is disgusting that no plans were made to help the vulnerable

The lack of responses to your OP answer your question.
Frighteningly too few people care. It seems we're heading towards a world where disabled and elderly lives don't matter to many people.
I hope that changes. It's not a society I want to belong to.
Poor man.

Their was plans. But people have to be expected to ask for help, yes including disabled people.

The thing is the help was really slow, even if you asked for it.

I was diagnosed with cancer in late May. It took a month from when my GP added me for the system to work and for me to be added to the shielding list to be able to get food deliveries in a reliable way. The GP surgery followed up with me after a week and proactively referred me to the local volunteer group (outwith the standard shielding process) who contacted me after 12 days. During this time we had gone into self isolation with cv 19 symptoms. Of all my cancer diagnostic process, the fear of realising that the system would not work in time and the fear of trying to work out how to feed my 3 children under 7 in that first week where I had covid and had just been diagnosed with cancer and was waiting to hear if had metastasised, that fear was the worst point. The system never worked. It is fucking disgraceful and I felt so abandoned by my government, who could not invest in the infrastructure to give people basic necessities but will fund a meal deal. I will never ever forget this. If I didn't have a support network, we would have been scraping the barrel ourselves despite my preparation. I can totally see how this happened.

Don't victim blame for this person not asking for help. It wouldn't have mattered if they did. It takes less than 10 days to die of starvation.

I posted on here at the time. I asked for help but was told that I fell through the gaps - my health problems are quite rare. If I hadn’t stocked up for brexit that could have been me.

Because no one in the government has first hand experience of isolated vulnerable family members and care homes i expect.
I doubt Johnson or Cummings are dealing with Auntie X, ever tried to sort her care home out or checked there's a care package for her at home.

There were contingency plans, but unfortunately there will always be a few people that fall through the gaps.
My daughter is disabled, cared for at home by me, and we were checked up on frequently by phone, and I have numbers to ring in case of emergency. We've also been offered support in person if we need it for a
appointments, etc.
This whole system was set up in a matter of days, to cover a population of over 65 million people, sadly it's probably inevitable that a few people would be missed.

I agree with @Ihaveshitneighbours

The first few weeks, as a shielded household were really tough, and that's with normally fit, healthy people who were reasonably good (after huge amounts of frustration) in securing access to food.

What happened to others was absolutely disgusting largely because common sense went out of the window (care home which had been making an £3k weekly order from Tesco was given the same weekly items cap as a single household).

There is no single, influential voice in the centre of government advocating for the social care sector; thus despite the interface between social care and NHS being one of the policy areas of most concern.and social care generally being seen as an area for potential crisis. But, like the pensions gap, it's not happening now, so it's not a vote winner, and if not a vote winner, it won't be at the heart of policy.

And even now the initial wave has passed, I see all too many Covid threads in which people are more than happy to say that the most vulnerable shouid just stay inside. And even though I get shouted out from time to time for pointing out this is wrong and unfair (especially if you include both the vulnerable (which includes the elderly, and some argue should include all BAME) and the exceptionally vulnerable (medical conditions, not by age); I'll still keep saying it

I think the attitudes towards disabled and elderly people regularly displayed on MN ("they should just stay at home, Covid only affects the elderly and vulnerable who were going to die soon anyway so why have we wrecked the economy for them", "I've given up enough for people who were going to die anyway" and more in a similar vein) reflect what government think.

People just don't consider the elderly and vulnerable, what their needs are, how difficult systems are to navigate especially if you have communication difficulties or aren't technology savvy, how difficult it is to advocate for yourself if you are already unwell, how easy it is for people to fall through the cracks if they aren't able to fight for themselves. There are too few safeguards within the NHS and care sector.

Because the masses prefer to ignore the disabled in case it’s catching.

Sexism and racism is called out regularly on MN, disability discrimination isn’t, a parent with a SN child posted and was told to post on the SN boards instead. Off you pop, you don’t belong here.

The ageism on here is equally as disgraceful.

My heart goes out to parents with disabled children and anybody caring for someone during this time.

Loads of reasons

There was no one with any expertise on social care on SAGE, only health experts. There is now a SAGE sub group on social care but that was only set up in June

They assumed everyone was on line or could get on line. The Only way to register for help from the Government was to do it on a website. That 60% of ppl over 65 are not in fact on line never occurred

They assumed everyone would have family members who would arrange support

They were only interested in clearing the hospitals & because they had no one with social care expertise on SAGE they didn’t understavd isolating Covid positive ppl in care homes was almost impossible

They didn’t know most care workers work in more than one care home

The NHS took priority for all PPE so care homes And domiciliary care companies struggled to access any supplies

There were plans. We had regular calls asking if we needed any help or food delivery etc.
What really is disgusting is that some people don't think about helping their elderly or disabled neighbours or checking up on them to see if they were okay.

Including the reasons above, I think one issue is that there is no slack in UK public services, no extra resource that can gain knowledge and act immediately.

For example, if a concerned neighbour calls social services because they haven’t seen vulnerable person for a few days how quickly will they be able to act?

With Covid I suspect those response times have reduced even further.

That too Phoenix plus I think one of the uncomfortable truths the pandemic has exposed is that some ppl really don’t have anyone

Do meals on wheels still exist? I think they were a LA service that deliverers food to the vulnerable/elderly.

Something as simple as that would allow staff to log concerns with appropriate teams for investigation.

But again, no slack.

44,220 deaths from #COVID1919_
22,447 of those had a disability
Why is this not trending?
Why is this not the lead of every media outlet?
Why is there not condemnation of the systems failings?
Why did so many disabled people die?
Where is the humanitarian shock?^

When the media first reported deaths, it was always couched with the reassurance that the person had 'underlying health conditions'. To reassure the nation that those people don't matter, you will be fine. They would have died soon anyway, or not worth saving. Literally, the flow chart issued to medics discriminated against those with disabilities, those whose lives were not worth saving.

Our government let us down because they truly believe we are worth less - we are worthless.

A lot of the pandemic guidance was based on influenza which older people tend to be less vulnerable to than young ppl. No one was prepared for a novel respiratory disease which had the very worst outcomes for the elderly.

Kirklands WA outbreak told world by early March about the risks to care homes. I was talking to local council about care home risks by start April to help inform response, the care homes were already by then (national database) reporting on their PPE & staff demands. Local NHS teams did a lot of interventions, too, targeted at care homes. But the councils/NHS were literally fighting a lot of fires at once, and had to first focus on finding enough HDU beds and rehab beds before they could go back to things like community transmission pathways.

Being able to ask for help is a big assumption to make. People can detioriate very quickly or never have these skills anyway.

My view is:

• Complacent and slow approach if government
• Underfunded local services and over reliance on informal networks to plug gaps created since Osborne first started cutting everything
• lack of public health approach, it was treated like an NHS issue
• deliberate decision to fund private sector and not use local councils
• late realisation we would have to lockdown meant it was rushed and chaotic

If perhaps the PM could have found time to chair COBRA and treat it like a proper crisis, we might have had a more sensible response. The political management has been shocking.

TL;DR - no one really gives a toss about the disabled in the UK. Out of sight, out of mind and all that.

I've been with DW who uses a wheelchair (and has other needs, due to MS) and it's got worse since we met in the mid 1990s which I'd say were probably a high water mark.

I think unfortunately the man you're discussing wasn't on the states radar and that's no-ones fault. He had moved independently to that area and has family who apparently didn't know he was living alone.

There were too many gaps for people to fall through, but I don’t think we can blame the government for everything. They obviously never intended for anyone to starve, that’s why the rule was to go out for essentials like food if you needed to. Society collectively needs to take some responsibility, and in plenty of areas, they did. Every single home in my area received leaflets twice during full lockdown offering help from volunteers, but it did rely on people asking for help when they needed it, and it relied on people being kind and volunteering in the first place but there were more than enough of those people.

but it did rely on people asking for help when they needed it, and it relied on people being kind and volunteering in the first place but there were more than enough of those people.

This is precisely what was wrong. No vulnerable person should have been abandoned to volunteers. From the get go this was a safeguarding nightmare to me - no one knew who these volunteers were, there was no co ordination, no checks done. They were just random people visiting very vulnerable people. Secondly, lots of people aren't able to ask for help, certainly within a system that makes it nigh on impossible. To register with government you had to go on line, many people, the elderly in particular, aren't able to do this. Most of the information on how to ask for help was on line - we've never received the leaflet that government apparently sent to every household, where would I find help if I couldn't look on line?

I am still not on the supermarket extremely vulnerable list despite me registering three times and the council also registering me. I eventually saw a number on here and phoned and Tesco added me - two weeks ago. Even then, I needed to be able to shop on line.

We also need to remember that caring for the sick and elderly in our community is the responsibility of all of us, not just the government/local authorities. I know most of my immediate neighbours. We don't live in each other's pockets but those more able amongst us know those who might appreciate a bit of help in unusual times. For example, on the rare occasions we have had snowy/icy weather we will ring round to see if they need anything from the shops when we are going and know that they would be reluctant to go out because the pavements are slippy, or whatever.

I live in a village and within a day of so of lockdown being announced every household was leafleted with phone numbers to ring if anyone needed shopping or prescriptions collecting. Also the local pub offered a takeaway food delivery service. We didn't wait for the authorities to sort it so for us.

Our communities also have responsibility.

Our communities do and should have responsibility, but if we want to keep vulnerable people safe and alive we need a functioning safety net.

@labyrinthloafer - I agree fully.

@Hearhoovesthinkzebras it was shameful for the U.K. to have to ask volunteers to plug public service gulfs. To plug a gap in a pandemic is fine but in my opinion and experience relying on unvetted volunteers to provide assistance to vulnerable people is madness.

I know a totally unsuitable man (DV/aggression) who was accepted to assist. Luckily he (among others I know) were never given any tasks.

The lack of responses to your OP answer your question

Indeed; were the subject almost any other group, the thread would be ten times the length by now

As for the government's view I can only repeat the words of a very wise social worker I know: "so many of the disabled don't vote"