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BBC News - Coronavirus: Sending untested patients to care homes 'reckless' - MPs https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-53574265
This sadly isn't new to anyone following regional media coverage which reported multiple instances of sick/ vulnerable patients being sent untested into care homes - where it was almost inevitable they would affect other residents and staff.
Birmingham's @JaneRockHouse was among the first to reveal hundreds of patients in the city had been transferred with care home staff having no way of knowing who had the illness or not https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/revealed-how-many-untested-positive-18253284
This report in @LivEchonews reveals the very real cost of this failure. A grandad who contracted the illness at a care home after untested patients were moved into his care home. https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/family-fear-beloved-dad-died-18327030
This was a failure in UK government policy. Hospitals in Scotland were also discharging untested patients straight into care homes (as reported here by LDR @KathrynAldr) https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/local-news/over-100-patients-were-discharged-22101475
And this was also the case in Wales... (h/t @DPJezHemming) https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/horrifying-number-hospital-patients-sent-18651258
To be clear, this was not the fault of individual hospital staff or those working in care homes. It was a failure by those in charge of Covid planning for the NHS (ultimately government ministers) to foresee the huge risk to care home populations...
Although the government closed this loophole several weeks into lockdown, more than 25,000 untested patients had already been discharged into care homes. Today, the PAC report described this as an 'appalling errror' and the government's initial planning around this as 'reckless'
There will be no shortage of lessons to learn from the pandemic response - but given what we already know about the wave of care home deaths what seems like a wrenching, systematic oversight will surely go down as a national scandal.
