“Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave?” - Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
I had not intended to write this blog. However, Boris Johnson’s comments about care homes and their response to the Coronavirus epidemic has angered me so much I can only exorcise that anger by writing about it.
I have investment here having spent over 10 years visiting care and nursing homes all over the country providing training on the law relating to decision-making by residents – their rights and the staff’s responsibilities. While doing this I met countless hard working, selfless people totally dedicated to the well-being of their residents. These carers came from all over the world and managers would remark to me that British people just would not do the kind of caring required by the elderly and infirm and those with dementia. The staff worked long hours for basic minimum pay. Managers would regularly comment about the lack of funding. However, everybody just got on with the job without complaining. I was in awe of these unsung heroes caring for hundreds of mostly elderly people the rest of society had often just forgotten about.
So, let us start with what the Prime Minister actually said. According to Sky News he claimed “too many” in the care sector “didn’t really follow the procedures” during the Coronavirus crisis.
Let us put these remarks into context. At the beginning of the crisis the NHS transferred 24,000 patients to care homes. Nobody knows if they were or were not tested for the virus. What is certain many were not and would have, unknowingly, taken the virus out of hospitals into care homes. This was done to spare Boris Johnson the embarrassment of television cameras prowling hospital corridors overflowing with patients and unable to cope as had happened in other countries. It was not by accident “protect the NHS” was a slogan for the epidemic. This was achieved by transferring the problem to underfunded, understaffed and underprepared care homes where, to date, the lives of 20,000 residents (source: BBC News) have been claimed by the virus. In many homes GPs and community nurses stopped visiting and hospitals would not take admissions.
Tracing had started and then stopped by Johnson’s government. Testing outside hospitals was non-existent for weeks and there was a constant shortage of personal protective equipment. Johnson’s “world beating” tracing app was due go public at the end of June but is now months away from being available. There was a long delay in providing testing to staff and residents and issues continue to persist.
Johnson has presided over approaching 45,000 deaths (source: BBC News) of those actually tested but 64,000 excess deaths (source: ONS) over the worst three-month period of the crisis. By whatever measures one chooses to use, the UK has one of the worst death rates in the world. Johnson placed the UK into a league of death with total failure countries like Brazil and the United States who have leaders in denial about what is happening.
And Johnson’s response to this catalogue of failure……is to gaslight the care home sector and seek to shift responsibility from himself to the care homes that struggled as best they could, unsupported, and ignored. Let us remember that for weeks, at the height of the epidemic, our television news channels were full of stories of struggling care homes short of PPE and specialist support and unable to test. Even the Daily Mail, of all newspapers, took up the cause on their behalf.
The alternative past Johnson is trying to create is that the government set the rules, but homes refused to follow them thereby killing their own residents. There is not a crumb of evidence to support this.
The reality is that the government set the rules, homes followed them but Johnson did not like the results so Johnson is now denying setting those rules and is seeking to blame the people that were simply trying to do their best.
Over the four months crisis period Johnson was mostly hiding in his bunker and only emerged to show some animated leadership when Dominic Cummings took a lockdown trip to Durham and then a trip to Barnard Castle on his wife’s birthday to check his eyesight. While Johnson was preaching to the rest of us to stay at home, his chief advisor was driving across the country. He should have been sacked but instead Johnson rewarded this with a press conference in the 10 Downing Street garden. Johnson did the daily press conference that day before disappearing back to the bunker again, leaving his Cabinet poodles to take the flak much as he had done since the beginning of the outbreak.
Now I know Johnson contracted the virus, but you would have thought that experience would have taught him some humility and appreciation of the challenges faced by those caring for those with Covid-19. I guess that self-reflection and learning is are not Johnson’s strong points.
What Johnson should now do is apologise for his clumsy and insulting remarks and I mean a proper apology not one of those “if I offended you, I am sorry” type apologies. He should invite the care leaders to Downing Street for a reception to thank them for what they did and continue to do. He may learn something from them but again listening and learning are not his thing. Lastly, he should visit a care home to see at first hand the challenges they faced and continue to do so. Again I doubt this will happen as a photo opportunity handshake with a 80-year-old with dementia, who does not know who you are, is probably not worth much in the popularity stakes compared to jumping on a digger wearing a hard hat.
Johnson should also commit to a speedy, independent and public inquiry into the handling of the pandemic. It is important we learn lessons in case before the predicted second wave over the coming winter. Again, I doubt this, as populists with an eye for gesture politics (anyone for another clapping event or a candle lighting) just do not do no-blame-learning. Going into Trump style denial or just blaming somebody else is much easier.
If anyone deserves to have the finger pointed at them, it is the political leadership in the PM’s Office, the Treasury and the Department of Health and Social Care. They were making the key strategic decisions about PPE, testing, tracing, quarantine and the rest of it. They were the ones signing off the barrage of guidance that was thrown at care homes. They were the ones going into denial when both the NHS and care sector were saying we do not have the resources to cope.
Thousands of families have lost their loved ones to Covid-19 in care homes and care home workers themselves have died on the front line. Many will feel insulted by Johnson’s comments shifting the blame to staff by claiming they did not follow the procedures.
I feel angry on their behalf. Sadly, this is a signal for the next four years. When things go wrong, victims will be found and the blameless will be blamed.
Johnson’s government is truly a Frankenstein construct – a monster in the making.
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