Care home residents were “neglected and left to starve” during the pandemic, lawyers representing bereaved relatives have told Scotland’s Covid inquiry. The Telegraph has more.
Shelagh McCall KC said the “blanket ban” on care home visits made it impossible for families to check on the welfare of their loved ones and their phone calls “went unanswered over days and sometimes weeks”.
In a damning opening statement to the inquiry, she said some of them were treated “with disdain” when they managed to contact care home staff and their questions “fobbed off”.
She said families were told a resident was fine “only to get a sudden hurried phone call that they were dying”, with some not seeing their loved ones again following the onset of lockdown.
Other relatives reported “a significant deterioration of their loved ones’ physical and mental health” that “was nothing to do with COVID-19”, she said.
Ms. McCall said that “some suspect that their loved one was suffering from neglect, dehydration and starvation”, and medical records were found to be “missing or incomplete” for those that died.
She also predicted the inquiry would hear that residents were forced into agreeing to do not resuscitate plans, and that the evidence would “point to a systemic failure of the model of care”.
Another group representing bereaved relatives said the policy pursued by Nicola Sturgeon’s Government at the start of the pandemic, of discharging untested hospital patients into care homes, was “ultimately a death sentence for the elderly”.
In its opening statement, Scottish Covid Bereaved – a support group for families of those who died during the pandemic – questioned whether SNP ministers considered the science before making their decisions or “marched a few steps behind Boris Johnson into the deadly bedlam that he stands accused of in his handling of the pandemic”.
The evidence was heard on the second day of the Scottish Covid Inquiry, chaired by Lord Brailsford in Edinburgh, examining the response to the pandemic.
An official report found 113 Scottish hospital patients who had tested positive for coronavirus, without later testing negative, were transferred to care homes in March, April and May 2020.
A further 3,061 were sent from hospitals to care homes in the period without being tested. Jeane Freeman, Ms. Sturgeon’s Health Secretary at the time, has previously admitted that “we didn’t take the right precautions”.
Ms. McCall was representing Bereaved Relatives Group Skye, a group of bereaved relatives and care workers from Skye and five other health board areas of Scotland.
She told the inquiry that families wanted to know why Covid was allowed to enter care homes and “spread like wildfire”.
“We anticipate that the inquiry will hear that people were pressured to agree to sign do not resuscitate notices, and that people were not resuscitated even though no such notice was in place,” she said.
“That residents may have been neglected and left to starve, that families are not sure they were told the truth about their relative’s cause of death, that the usual process for the certification of death was departed from.”
Ms. McCall said the inquiry must investigate potential violations of Article 3 of the Human Rights Act prohibiting “torture, inhuman and degrading treatment”.
“Relatives will speak of their loved ones lacking food, water, and hygiene. That there was inappropriate, inadequate, absent or delayed medical attention,” she added. …
David McKie, representing Independent Care Homes Scotland (ICHS), which comprises 11 firms operating 156 homes with around 13,000 staff. He said the “burden was an extraordinary one and at times intolerable for staff to carry”.
He said ICHS members had “profound concerns across a range of the decisions made by Government”, citing a six-day delay before Scotland followed England by stopping untested hospital patients being moved into homes.
Mr. McKie also highlighted SNP ministers’ “failure to lift visiting restrictions” in summer 2020 and “attempts by the Scottish Government to shift responsibility onto the independent care sector”.
Worth reading in full.
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The phrase “saving the planet” should always be in inverted commas because it is the most ridiculous of many in the eco lexicon. The planet is 4.5 billion years old and has been through a heck of a lot more in its history than we can ever throw at it. It will be here for several billion years more until the sun expands to swallow it. It doesn’t need to be “saved”, it will be fine.
The phrase that grates with me is ‘we need to…’
(i.e. YOU need to)
And saving it for what… a rainy day?
I suspect Louise Haigh’s stunningly attractive hair dye was probably made from petroleum products. Will Miliband please ban petroleum-based hair dyes?
Greta Thunberg’s day without fossil fuels – Part 1 by John A. Shanahan – Issuu
… the car-makers will tell the [our clown-world government] that thousands of jobs in the industry will soon be lost because of the unrealistic targets to sell Electric Vehicles. …
I imagine that their response would go something like this: “Industry, you say? Jobs in manufacturing, you say? Where people make things … with their hands? Good lord! Are these jobs by any chance for oiks and the other deplorables? Are they [shudder] for the white working class?”
All well and good, but once these facilities are shuttered and gone, and the economic cluster around the is done for, with at least as many jobs again exported to China, THERE IS NO WAY BACK.
England will be a pathetic shell economy.
I don’t think anybody certainly in government can imagine how bad it’s going to be.
I told those of my family who would listen, when the Scamdemic started that there would be blood on the streets. I see no reason to revise that opinion.
It won’t be a civil war. It will be a negotiation and the unions will be bought off in some way… at the expense of everyone else.
The union leaders might well be bought off. The union membership won’t be.
Slightly Off-T but worth posting…
https://off-guardian.org/2024/11/18/explained-how-uk-inheritance-tax-is-part-of-the-war-on-food/
Kit Knightly making the same points I have been making about Labour’s IHT land grab.
We are in a war with our government and people need to wake up.
I think the IHT fiasco is just another example of incompetent politicians not understanding what they are dealing with and the unintended consequences of their actions. Some think that not using land for farming is a good idea https://ukinvestormagazine.co.uk/why-increased-farm-inheritance-tax-will-be-good-for-the-uk-economy/?mc_cid=532a006992&mc_eid=abc92e5fcd Try this rubbish for example.
Off topic but highly important while everyone is talking about the farmers.
Dutch official reveals Covid was a military operation by NATO. I’m sure this is news to nobody who is aware that the US and the DOD runs (before Trump gets in) NATO.
But this is the first I have heard of an ‘official’ on Western Government admitting this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqv2YMn0q2o
It was the response to the pandemic that might have been but not the origin of Covid. It came from one of two labs in Wuhan.
Yes. I deduced that a while ago. In Europe, it was NATO and 5 Eyes countries which imposed the Covid Tyranny; Sweden didn’t.
Why? Because until very recently, Sweden wasn’t in NATO so didn’t have to follow Orders. It was an American Military Operation.
Labour – red in hair and tie!
It seems Farage is a sell-out to Islam.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z0KoQ4Fot4&list=WL&index=2
What people miss is that Car Makers do not actually make the cars from scratch, but assemble pre made component items into a finished article. If a car plant shuts and the jobs are lost, so will the effects be felt by the component suppliers. The ripple effect goes onto, shops, cafes, all the places that those once employed by the car industry go to spend their money. 1 job loss can morph into dozens.
The decline in employment effects a decline in the economics of all areas concerned with life and all it entails.
Sunderland (Nissan) could have voted for a Reform MP; they voted Labour. Like the Welsh, who also continually vote for their own destruction, I have little sympathy.
I’m in Wales and voted Reform, though not sure I would again the way Nigel seems to capitulate to Islam. Anyway, it is mostly in the S Wales Valleys that they are hardened Labour supporters because of the Mining history. But compare the voting to a few years ago, Labour is not as popular as it was.
The UK a global leader??? The UK accounts for approximately 0.164% of the global land area, and not forgetting land is only 30% of the global surface area, with the oceans being a major (temperature dependent) CO2 sink/source. Some leader!
Nothing done in the UK’s Net Zero drive will reduce atmospheric CO2 by one molecule. This is not only because our emissions are minuscule but also because we are not reducing them but are merely offshoring them.
Net Zero is about setting an example for the big emitters to follow. But India and China, who each out more new CO2 every year than our entire annual output, cannot follow. Where are they supposed to offshore their emissions to?
The true Net Zero agenda is not about going green but about going extinct, or at least pre-industrial. It is rooted not in environmentalism but in misanthropy, pessimism, and mental illness.
Strikes, power cuts, inflation, high taxes, capital flight, brain drain, general gloom and doom, soaring debt and public spending, Labour Government.
Yup, that was 1974. Described to a tee.