Yeah - I know. My father, who had severe senile dementia, ended his days in a care home. But people in care homes can be protected. Access is tightly controlled - you have to be buzzed in by a member of staff. Providing staff are tested daily and not allowed to work in multiple care homes and visitors are restricted , the death rate in care and nursing homes could be kept low.
You would think it would be very easy to protect residents in care homes but apart from the obvious risks of staff infecting residents, a significant problem is just as likely to be the families of residents.
My wife is a nurse but her current job is working as a deputy manager of a residential home for elderly people. They have a significant number of residents with clinical needs hence my wife working there where she provides clinical advice in a managerial capacity and leads in practical terms on the floor where required.
The initial problems with residents being infected with coronavirus were through staff bringing it into the home and through residents being infected during hospital visits or short stays in hospital and bring it back with them to the home.
Proper precautions and a more widely available and rigorous testing process have largely overcome those problems.
The real challenge these days is the families of residents trying to visit and taking opportunities to visit without the permission or sometimes even the knowledge of the staff.
There have been instances where because of circumstances, a family member will be given permission to visit a resident. The resident might be ill, possibly terminally ill and after advice from PHE etc, a family member may be given permission to enter the building.
The family will be advised that one person may attend. At the agreed time, unknown to the home management, four or five family members will attend for the visit and staff on the floor will not be aware they are all there until it’s too late.
Some residents will ask if they can visit an outside location for a reason. A funeral or a visit to a grave on the anniversary of the death of the deceased seem to be popular reasons. Again, advice is sought from PHE and if the resident and the family agree to the conditions, the visit is allowed to go ahead. Again, often a few days later, it will transpire that the resident has after the graveside visit been taken to someones house where they have mixed with a large group of people before returning to the home.
It can be as simple as a resident saying they wish to go outside to smoke a cigarette. They are taken outside and left to smoke their cigarettes and unknown to the staff, they have phoned the family on their mobile phone and four or five family members turn up to sit with them outside without any social distancing.
There is a continuous battle between the staff of the home and residents families to try and prevent coronavirus getting into the building where it would undoubtedly cause at least some deaths if it did get in there.
Families are spoken to respectfully and the facts and the risks to residents are explained to them and promises are received that there won’t be any repeated instances but the promises are always broken at every opportunity.
And it gets worse because staff then need to start taking further action to prevent infections coming into the building and that means families finding it more difficult to find ways to dodge the rules so they start ringing the company up and complaining that they are finding it difficult to meet their relatives in the home but they conveniently leave out parts of the story about what they had actually agreed to and when pressed on those issues actually deny those parts of the story and allege that staff are lying about what was said and agreed.
This is a real problem and the staff are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.
Everybody wants to facilitate the best that can be achieved for residents in terms of contact with their families but those families will promise to follow whatever they are asked to do and they are fully informed of the reasons why these terms must be adhered to but on virtually every single occasion, when it comes down to the visit, the agreed arrangements just go straight out of the window as far as the families are concerned.
Once their foot is in the door, all bets are off about any agreed procedures to protect the health of residents in the home.