Skip to content
openDemocracy
Subscribe

‘We will need to discharge Covid patients into care homes’

March 2020 email from Jenny Harries said sending Covid patients into social care would be ‘the reality’

By Ruby Lott-Lavigna
‘We will need to discharge Covid patients into care homes’
A care home in Falmouth during the first year of the Covid pandemic. Karen Hastings visits her stepfather Gordon, who suffers from dementia, at the Langholme Care Home on 28 November 2020. An email from Jenny Harries reveals that the government was warned about discharging Covid patients back into care homes as early as March 2020, but concluded that the policy was clinically appropriate. It was later found to be illegal | Hugh R Hastings/Getty Images
Published:
Share

A government medical chief advised the government in March 2020 that it would “need” to discharge Covid-positive patients back into care homes.

In an email shown to the Covid inquiry on Wednesday, England’s former deputy chief medical officer Jenny Harries wrote that discharging infectious patients would be “the reality”, even though families with loved ones in care homes “will not welcome” this.

"Whilst the prospect is perhaps what none of us would wish to plan for, I believe the reality will be that we need to discharge Covid-19 positive patients into residential care settings,” she told a top civil servant on 16 March 2020.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. If you have any queries about republishing please contact us. Please check individual images for licensing details.

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0