Care home manager Anita Astle at Wren Hall Nursing Home in Selston, Nottinghamshire has revealed she is “heartbroken” after nine of her residents have died from suspected coronavirus.
She said: “It’s soul destroying, staff are heartbroken, its awful to watch people deteriorate, and people are deteriorating very rapidly. It’s just horrendous.”
She confirmed that 16 other residents showed common symptoms of the virus, yet only one was transferred to hospital for treatment.
Anita went on to reveal that she had spent nearly £9,000 on personal protective equipment (PPE) for her staff, but that these only lasted 10 days and that she has struggled to gain access to the stead supply that her dementia care home desperately needs.
This tragic case comes to light as the UK government has been criticised for not including people who have died from coronavirus in their homes or in care home facilities in their daily official death tolls.
The new shadow social care minister, Liz Kendall, recently wrote to the health secretary, Matt Hancock, urging the government to include fatalities from outside hospitals in their daily death toll figures rather than to publish them weekly as is currently the procedure.
She said: “This delay obscures the scale of the spread of COVID-19 in care homes and the impact on some of the most vulnerable people in our society”.
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“I therefore urge you to put in place a system where deaths relating to COVID-19 outside of hospital, including in care homes, are collected and reported regularly to the Department of Health and Social Care and published daily alongside deaths in hospitals.
“For families and care staff, accurate and timely reporting of deaths of people in care homes is an essential step in tackling this problem and saving as many lives as possible. It will also enable the government to focus its efforts on ensuring all care staff get the PPE and testing they need.”
The Department of Health and Social Care has confirmed that 2,099 care homes in England have had cases of the virus, which caused the charity Age UK to claim coronavirus was “running wild” in care homes for the elderly.
Caroline Abrahams, Charity Director at Age UK, has said: “The current figures are airbrushing older people out like they don’t matter.”
Meanwhile, recent data from several European countries that have been badly affected by the coronavirus, including Italy, Spain and France, suggest that care home residents could account for between 42-57% of all deaths related to COVID-19.
The figures from Europe that were taken between April 6 and April 11 could suggest a higher rate of infection and fatality from COVID-19 than is currently being conveyed.
Professor Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, has said: “One of the things we want to do is to extend the amount of testing of people in care homes as the ability to test ramps up over the next few weeks. Because clearly care homes are one of the areas where there are large numbers of vulnerable people, and that is an area of risk, and therefore we would very much like to have more extensive testing.”
