Nursing homes ‘yet to see benefits’ of commitments on tests

Nursing homes “have yet to see the benefits” of commitments made regarding Covid-19 testing and the provision of personal protective equipment (PPE), according to the representative body for the sector.

Tadhg Daly, chief executive of Nursing Homes Ireland (NHI), which represents 390 of Ireland’s 440 such facilities, said that some workers in Irish nursing homes have been waiting for test results for 20 days, a pattern replicated across the country as the HSE struggles with a testing backlog of 14,500 people.

“We very much welcome the reprioritisation of healthcare workers, but to be blunt, we haven’t seen the benefits, and we know of people who could be working if they had their results,” he said.

Nursing homes have emerged as among the hardest hit of all impacted institutions across the country, with 54%, or 156, of the deaths due to Covid-19 as at Friday evening occurring either within such care or from a hospital referral from same.

NHI was among the first bodies to act against the virus in early March, instructing its homes to restrict all non-essential visitors, a decision which was subsequently criticised as overly draconian by the chief medical officer, Dr Tony Holohan.

However, the National Public Health Emergency Team subsequently changed its stance regarding that advice, which proved prescient given the nationwide lockdown announced on March 27.

Meanwhile, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has refused to state whether Dr Holohan’s initial decision with regard to nursing homes last month was correct.

Mr Varadkar, in an interview in the Sunday Independent, said “it was always likely that there would be clusters in nursing homes” and an assessment of the Government’s response to Covid-19 in a nursing home context cannot be made “until we’re through this crisis”.

In a week which saw cases of Covid-19 and ICU admissions and deaths related to the virus hold steady in the face of an expected surge, nursing homes have become the epicentre of the crisis in an Irish context, with clusters in homes and other residential institutions almost trebling in that time to 178 as of last Thursday.

Mr Daly said he was “surprised” by Dr Holohan’s comments at the time of the original NHI restriction order, but said the chief medical officer “is doing a very good job in very difficult circumstances”.

He would not be drawn on Mr Varadkar’s comments yesterday. “We felt we made the right decision at the time, but we don’t need to be looking back; what we want to do is look forward,” he said.

Some 25,000 people live in Ireland’s nursing homes.

Mr Daly said he believes the crisis in the sector results from “delays in testing, that many residents may have had the virus for a number of weeks, and because nursing homes are a vital part of a functioning health service, we’re obviously still accepting residents from acute hospitals”. He added: “But the pattern of high infection rates in nursing homes is one being seen across the world, so I don’t think Ireland is any different.”

Regarding the Government’s extension of restrictions until May 5, Mr Daly said “people had been taken aback” by its length, but that nursing home restrictions would not be lifted “unless the timing is right”.

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