Jeane Freeman has admitted that the SNP administration failed to take the “right precautions” to ensure elderly people transferred from hospital to care homes to free up beds for Covid-19 patients would be safe.
Under questioning about how 3,000 care home residents had died from coronavirus, the health secretary said ministers had failed to adequately understand the social care sector.
“We wanted people who didn’t need to stay in hospital any longer, because they’d been treated and they were clinically well, to be discharged as quickly as possible so we freed up those beds for Covid patients,” she told Political Thinking with Nick Robinson, a BBC podcast.
“Remember, the early predictions about the number of people going into hospital were terrifying. But we didn’t take the right precautions to make sure that older people leaving hospital going into care homes were as safe as they could be and that was a mistake.
“Now, I might argue we couldn’t do anything other than we did, but it still created a real problem for those older people and for the others who lived in care homes and for the staff who worked in care homes.”
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In the early stages of the pandemic 900 people were transferred untested from hospitals to care homes. Fears had been raised that this had, in some cases, introduced the virus. Public Health Scotland was asked by ministers to investigate the outbreaks. When the report was published, Nicola Sturgeon quoted a passage that said: “There is no statistical evidence that hospital discharges of any kind were associated with care home outbreaks.”
The Office for Statistics Regulation later dismissed the first minister’s comments, and said the discharges were “consistent with a causal relationship” between transfers and outbreaks.
In January Sturgeon confirmed that she regarded a lack of testing in care homes as her biggest failing in the first wave, but continued to insist that she was unaware of the risk posed by asymptomatic members of staff unwittingly infecting residents.
Jackie Baillie, Scottish Labour’s health spokeswoman, said: “These admissions will offer no comfort to the families of those who needlessly lost loved ones due to the Scottish government’s errors. Lessons that could have been learned were ignored. The time for reflection was when it could have saved lives, not now on podcasts.”
Douglas Ross, the Scottish Conservative leader, said that it was a “disgrace that the SNP covered up their mistake for so long”.
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He added: “The transfer of Covid-positive patients didn’t just cause a ‘real problem’, as Jeane Freeman states, it cost many vulnerable people their lives.
“People will be left wondering — why is Jeane Freeman only willing to admit such a huge mistake was made now?”
June Andrews, a professor of dementia studies, last week accused Freeman of wrongly suggesting that Covid-19 had spread rapidly through private care homes because they were concerned about making a profit. Freeman said that she had never blamed care homes or their staff for pandemic deaths.