UK care homes were ‘PUSHED’ to admit Covid-positive and untested patients at height of the outbreak, new survey shows
RT.com
UK care home staff was “under constant pressure” from the NHS to take in coronavirus-positive and untested patients, while nurses were instructed not to resuscitate them, a new study has revealed.
In a study whose key findings were first published by the Independent, the Queen’s Nursing Institute (QNI) surveyed nurses and managers working in 163 care homes across England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
The staff at 70 care homes, 43 percent of those surveyed, said that they received patients discharged from hospitals who were not tested for Covid-19 during March and April, when the outbreak first hit the country and peaked. A fifth of care homes said they received patients who tested positive.
The study revealed that in some cases, seriously ill patents were brought into care homes from the hospitals even when the homes warned that they were incapable of looking after them. One nurse reported “constant pressure to admit people who were Covid-positive.” Another similarly said that “the acute sector pushed us to take untested admission.”
The two weeks of daily deaths during an outbreak were possibly the two worst weeks of my 35-year nursing career.
The staff reported that hospitals instructed them to change the status of all residents to “do not resuscitate.” One nurse said that such guidelines would “automatically” apply to all suspected or confirmed Covid-19 patients. Some of the surveyed nurses said that they refused to comply and challenged the instructions as “unethical.”