Hospitals may have broken the law by sending patients with Covid-19 back to care homes without telling their managers they had the virus.
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has been told that several hospitals returned people despite suspecting – or even knowing – they were infected.
Tragically, these patients triggered outbreaks in the homes, claiming the lives of other vulnerable residents.
Staff at the care homes would have not realised they had the virus so may not have been wearing adequate protective clothing or taken other infection control precautions.
The lawsuits that will come out of this will be
massive. Can we at least find out which are the guilty parties?
The CQC would not disclose the names nor the locations of those hospitals accused of failing to inform care home staff that patients had coronavirus.
*sighs*
The Department of Health issued separate guidance on April 2 that negative tests were ‘not required’ before discharging people into a care home.
That 'world class civil service', folks!
9 comments:
You must realise doing that is on their agenda it gets rid of the old ones that tend to NOT take government diktat quietly.
The lawsuits WOULD be massive, but they will fight tooth and nail to protect their own by withholding the information.
The mother in law has just contracted covid in a care home that has been locked down since well before the lockdown was official, plus she is on a sealed ward anyway. So it's either a member of staff (who have been fantastic with full PPE from the beginning) or an infected patient being returned from hospital. Previous experience of the local hospital killing relatives through incompetence leaves me in no doubt which it will be.
Over the years, a number of my relatives have fallen foul of incompetent administrators in the NHS but one of the most memorable has to be the woman whose job it was to liaise between hospital and care homes.
She arrived - without apology - over half an hour late for our appointment, brushing chocolate crumbs from her face, and spent most of our drastically abbreviated interview talking about her daughter's imminent fourth birthday party before dashing off to collect the child up from pre-school. When she did mention my relative, she repeatedly got the name wrong and, when she did ask for information, entered it incorrectly on the form - largely because, while ticking the boxes, she was busy taking a call from the bakery about her daughter's birthday cake.
If she is still in the same job - it's probably too much to hope that she has been sacked for incompetence, even though her haphazard form-filling cost me £5,000 - I think it highly likely that she was far more concerned aboout her daughter's twelfth birthday this April (or how to source Cadbury's Flakes under lockdown) than the small matter of infected patients being sent back into care homes.
I wonder whether, when she hears Thursday's clapping, she smiles complacently and thinks, 'That's for me - how nice!'
There will be a need for a lot of lawsuits when the virus finally burns itself out and a semblance of normality returns. I hope some of the first in the dock will be the shiny a***d managers who were supposed to make sure the relevant safety gear was in stock. Take the big money and slope your shoulders must be a thing of the past and personality I would like to see manslaughter charges brought. Talk about fiddle while Rome burns, these fat cat b*****ds should pay for the lives lost through their carelessness.
Nothing new - the medical profession always buries its mistakes.
I worked on electronics in clean room conditions.
Those electronics got better care than patients get in our hospitals.
Every clean room had an ante-chamber where staff put on sterile suits before entering clean area and on the way out the sterile suits stayed in the ante chamber.
The air was super filtered and room kept at positive pressure to ensure that no external air leaked in.
But then this was a private company (boo) wanting to keep customers happy. Strange idea.
Maybe they were trained by Shipman.
"You must realise doing that is on their agenda it gets rid of the old ones that tend to NOT take government diktat quietly."
I do, but I don't think even this government capable of that...
"...but they will fight tooth and nail to protect their own by withholding the information."
Only the lawyers will benefit. As always.
"...one of the most memorable has to be the woman whose job it was to liaise between hospital and care homes...."
Jesus! That's appalling! :/
" I hope some of the first in the dock will be the shiny a***d managers who were supposed to make sure the relevant safety gear was in stock. "
Won't happen. They are always well protected.
"Maybe they were trained by Shipman."
Heh!
Three observations about this appalling treatment of the elderly:
The Jobsworths at the hospital/care home interface are not medically trained and in general are too stupid to understand "infectious but showing no symptoms".
Also, they have no understanding of the incubation period, so OK today means 100% OK to them, no need to wait, isolated, for 5 - 7 days for a second test to be sure.
But most test kits are either contaminated (probably at source, if they came from China), or inaccurate, randomly giving both false positives and false negatives.
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