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The care minister in charge at the start of the pandemic called the discharge of coronavirus patients from hospitals to nursing homes a “huge success”. Report by Neil Johnston and Blathnaid Corless.
In March 2020, as the virus was beginning to spread in the UK, the Government decided to quickly discharge hospitalized care home patients without the need for testing or self-isolation.
Between March and June of that year, almost 20,000 care home residents in England and Wales died from Covid, and the High Court has since declared the discharge policy illegal.
However, minutes of a meeting in April 2020, attended by several cabinet ministers, show that the Government believed at the time that the policy had been a triumph.
The minutes, shown to the inquiry during Tuesday’s evidence, reveal that Helen Whately, the then Care Minister, said it had been “a great success”.
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