The former Welsh health minister faced questions about the decision to discharge some hospital patients to care homes without testing them for coronavirus.
Around three weeks ago the UK Covid-19 Inquiry turned its attention to the care sector. The latest phase has seen care home residents, workers, family members and policymakers take to the stand at a public hearing and share their experience of the pandemic.
Former Welsh health minister, Vaughan Gething, was recently in the spotlight. This marked the fifth time he has been involved with the inquiry, which first began hearings in 2023.
During the pandemic, and in the years following, Gething faced a vast amount of scrutiny. Many bereaved families who lost loved ones to Covid-19 have accused him of incompetence and arrogance. Some of these claims came in 2023 – the year in which the WhatsApp scandal was first exposed.
However, Gething’s (virtual) arrival at the latest hearing was met with similar tones. During the event he was quizzed about his decision to discharge hospital patients into care homes in early 2020 without proper testing – people who showed no immediate symptoms of the virus were free to just move in.
Ministers in Wales decided on 15th April that people should not be discharged into social care unless they tested negative for Covid-19, but guidance on testing for the care sector wasn’t published until 29th April 2020.
Against this backdrop, Gething admitted that the 14-day delay in providing the guidance should never have happened.
‘There was no advice that came to me saying “you should test everyone who is leaving hospital”’, Gething explained at the hearing. ‘That advice was never provided to me at this point in time. And I think it’s very hard to re-second guess all that and say “at the time should you have known” when actually I didn’t.
‘Looking back through, of course in hindsight you can see that actually you could have reduced risk if you had been able to test on discharge and that would have relied not just on capacity, but on the speed of turn-around from testing as well.’
Concluding his time on the stand, the former minister said that during the early stages of the pandemic the Welsh government was ‘on the back foot’. He remarked the UK government weren’t sharing information about testing earlier. While communication could’ve definitely been improved, this statement failed to address the 14-day delay before Welsh guidance was published for the care sector.
The fourth week of public hearings for the Covid-19 Inquiry are due to start again next week and they take place at Dorland House, London. The begin at 10:30am on a Monday and 10:00am Tuesday to Thursday. More information can be accessed here.
Photo by Chris Barbalis via UnSplash
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