South Tyneside health chief slams 'flawed strategy' of sending coronavirus patients back to care homes

Care staff in the borough were among the first in the country to get access to coronavirus testing, with a local system set up before the establishment of a national scheme.

But not using hospital beds, including those at the mothballed Nightingale Hospital, for suspected and confirmed cases has put the ‘most vulnerable’ at risk, it has been claimed.

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“It’s not new to us that areas of deprivation are the hardest hit by COVID,” said Paul Cuskin, a former civil servant and lay member of South Tyneside Clinical Commissioning Group’s (CCG) Governing Body.

“Care staff are doing extraordinary things, they’re coping with significant numbers of COVID patients going into care homes and that was the cost of protecting the NHS – which in my view was a flawed strategy.

“The difficulty I have is 70% capacity free in the NHS and the mantra to discharge people to care homes with COVID or who are asymptomatic.

“Should we not be using those facilities and the Nightingale Hospital for patients to convalesce and recover from COVID?

“The real issue I have is we have put very poorly people among the most vulnerable in society.”

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Cuskin was speaking at a meeting of the CCG’s governing body, which was held by video conference and broadcast via YouTube.

A report for the committee revealed testing has been in place for care staff in the borough since April 3, ‘significantly earlier’ than the national testing system.

This was followed by a testing regime for the ‘highest priority’ care homes from April 24 and for ‘all symptomatic residents’ from May 4.

However, Tom Hall, director of Public Health at South Tyneside Council, warned measures would soon be needed to protect staff and managers ‘starting to run on empty’.

Neil O’Brien, the CCG’s chief officer, said: “As we learn more about how COVID behaves, who is most vulnerable and how best to care for them, the strategy nationally for how to manage them will evolve.

“At the outset we were very much planning for the unknown – we saw pictures from Italy and we did not want that for our population.

“But now we understand how this spreads we would be foolish not to adapt.”

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