Care homes could finally allow in-person visits over Christmas thanks to rapid coronavirus testing.
Health secretary Matt Hancock confirmed yesterday pilot schemes are being run across 20 care homes in low-infection areas in Hampshire, Devon and Cornwall from this week.
‘I understand how important this is,’ he told BBC Breakfast.
‘And yes, our goal is to ensure that we have the testing available in every care home by Christmas – to make sure that people can take a test and therefore see their loved ones safely, that is the goal.
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‘We’re working closely with the social care sector to try to make that happen.
‘We’ve rolled it out in a small number of parts of the country, Devon and Cornwall in the first instance, and then our goal is to have this by Christmas so that people can see and and be close to their loved ones.’
He added though the final decision on allowing visits would rest with the individual care home and local councils.
It comes after eight months of people being unable to hug their vulnerable relatives living in residential care.
Under current rules, relatives can usually only see or touch loved ones through plastic screens.
Some care homes have been allowing garden or drive-through visits, but moving into winter these have been increasingly less practical.
The pilot is looking to assess whether indoor visits must still be socially distanced or whether it would be safe enough to hug and touch.
The trial schemes are using both the standard Covid-19 tests and the new lateral flow tests – which although give results in minutes could miss some cases.
The trial schemes will use both standard PCR tests or new lateral flow tests, which give results within minutes but miss between half and 25 per cent of cases.
There have been many reports in recent months of elderly people deteriorating after being left in isolation since March.
On BBC Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday, a man told Mr Hancock how visits to his wife’s care home had been severely restricted, affecting her dementia.
Michael Blackstad explained how coronavirus guidelines at his wife Trisha’s care home in Hampshire was making her situation a ‘nightmare’.
He said her Alzheimer’s had become ‘very far advanced’ but the only visitors she was allowed were care home staff dressed in personal protective equipment.
Mr Blackstad, who has Parkinson’s, said: ‘She was always a lively articulate person.
‘(Now) she stands, she fidgets, her head is bowed. She’s basically got this form of dementia which means she doesn’t like sitting down.
‘That makes it a nightmare being in a single room – it is like being stuck in a hotel room for three weeks without being able to go out. It’s just awful.’
Mr Blackstad said the care home was planning to put in a visiting facility that he described as being ‘rather like a prison’, with Perspex screens from ‘floor to ceiling’ and speakers, but only once there were no more Covid-19 cases at the residence.
Mr Hancock described the situation as ‘heartbreaking’ and ‘really difficult’.
‘I know this from personal circumstances as well in terms of members of my own family… who are in the same sort of situation. It is very difficult,’ he added.
‘The problem is that we know when this virus gets into care homes, we know that people in care homes are particularly vulnerable to it and it runs rife, and so we both need to protect people from the virus but also do that in as a humane a way as possible, and we know the impact on people’s health, let alone everything else, on not being able to see visitors.’
More than 20,000 care home residents died from Covid-19 during the first wave of the pandemic, partly because asymptomatic workers were allowed to freely move between care homes without being tested.
Official figures last week also showed more than 5,000 more dementia patients died during the first lockdown.
Between March 7 and May 1, when there were total visiting bans, the toll was 52% higher than normal, with the figure at 15,749 deaths.
But over the past five years an average of 10,345 people in the UK died from dementia in the same eight-week period, according to the Office for National Statistics.
This means there were 5,404 excess and potentially avoidable deaths during that time period this year – and the fatalities were not related to coronavirus.
Up to 80% of these excess deaths were in care homes, with experts claiming prolonged social isolation is likely to blame, as this is shown to accelerate the progression of dementia.
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