How many care homes are to blame for Covid deaths?

Cases of coronavirus are on the rise again inside care homes. Last week, Public Health England reported that 35 care homes had ‘infection incidents’ linked to Covid. And an internal Department of Health memo suggested that ‘satellite tests’ — which mainly take place in care homes — were picking up an estimated 1,100 new cases every day.

This is extremely worrying for the most vulnerable people in our society — almost half of Covid deaths in the UK, more than 19,000, have been in care homes — but especially worrying when you look at the care regulatory system presided over by the Care Quality Commission (CQC). As far as I can tell, England’s official care regulator has been actively stifling attempts to understand why so many people died — in particular, whether the deaths occurred in homes which the regulator had known were unsafe.

Under the CQC’s regulatory system, based on school inspections, each care facility in England is visited and given a rating on a sliding scale from Outstanding, through Good and Requires Improvement to In-adequate. Currently, one in five care homes for older people in England have officially failed their CQC inspections — they were either ‘Requires Improvement’ or simply ‘Inadequate’. That means some 2,000 are sitting on negative reports — including more than 150 which have officially been labelled inadequate.

In report after report, the biggest failing, almost invariably, was that they did not provide adequately ‘safe’ care, because of a lack of staff and a lack of understanding of basic good practice. And as the CQC acknowledges, badly run homes can leave residents vulnerable to abuse and infection.

Typically, bad homes do not have enough staff — residents can remain in bed all day or be left to sit in a high-backed chair in a lounge alongside numerous others.