@FlorenciaFlora
I truly believe there needs to be an investigation into what happened in care homes. When the biggest risk factor is living in a care home something is very wrong. A virus cannot know where you live.
Why were thousands of elderly people moved into care homes with instructions for them not to be tested for covid prior to admittance?
Why were blanket dnrs put on those people in care homes?
Why was the law changed regarding the use of controlled drugs in those care homes?
Why was the law changed to grant indemnity for staff looking after covid patients in those homes?
Why was the law changed to ban visitors from care homes?
Why was the law changed so that those deaths were not reported to the coroner?
Why was 2 years of sedatives dispensed within just a few months?
The “protective ring” around care homes didn’t happen. It is inconceivable that instructions were given to not test people prior to their admission to a care home.
Well, at grass roots level, hospitals were faced with a pandemic and were expecting 1000s of additional very ill people and 1000s of deaths, which is what actually happened.
We weren't staffed for a pandemic - staffing is stretched anyway - and a lot of medical & nursing staff were off ill themselves -so plans were made to keep hospitals running in the very worst of circumstances. The medical teams involved agonized over the best way to manage this.
The emphasis was on delivering the best care to the ill patients so emergency measures were put in place, to reduce administration and focus medical time on looking after the very ill. I agree though that when not in an emergency situation the normal processes would resume.
Initially there weren't tests for covid, then when tests became available, we knew they weren't 100% reliable, but we had to go with what we had, as we had nothing better to use. In my experience, we were testing patients before discharge from hospital to care homes; if they tested positive for covid they stayed in hospital till they had recovered from it.
Coroners do not have capacity to do 130k + post mortems in 18 months, there's no way they could have done post mortems on all covid deaths.
Visiting hospital wards for the elderly was a problem as efforts were being made to stop possible entry of infection from outside . (Normally visiting would be strongly encouraged). Of course, it was very difficult to prevent the staff themselves from getting infected (not uncommonly from patients) and some patients would have been admitted who then turned out positive for covid. Again, there was some agonising about allowing visitors for the very illest patients (which was very carefully allowed on a case by case basis, again in my own experience)
Re sedatives and controlled drugs, there was a need for palliative care protocols on some wards for elderly people, for example, where people couldn't be moved to ICU and needed to be made as comfortable as possible. The majority of elderly patients in hospital in these circumstances (in my experience) did in fact recover from covid, the aim was to ease symptoms when they were very ill. Controlled drugs include painkillers, for example.
I think on the level of the local hospital, the doctors and nurses may have done what they could in very difficult circumstances; nationally there are questions to ask, though I'd ask slightly different ones, such as why wasn't the pandemic planning better? Why were the supplies of PPE allowed to be run down? Why was the idea of herd immunity pursued as an option for so long?
And I would agree that there wasn't much evidence of a protective ring around care homes being thought through and made possible by the political bosses with the funding etc at the time.