THE Government has told care homes to make room for coronavirus patients who have been discharged from hospital, despite the policy being blamed for the spread of virus earlier this year.
The previous incarnation of this policy was disastrous and cruel, cutting a swathe through fragile care-home residents, locking them away from their families and at risk of neglect – whether unintentional or not – and maltreatment in inadequately staffed facilities, and leading to an ‘excess’ of non-Covid related deaths. For what? The threatened tsunami of Covid cases never hit the hospitals.
Despite all this, the Government seems determined to repeat the exercise. If a definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again in the hope of a different outcome, ministers have shown themselves to be in need of urgent treatment.
Meanwhile old people in fear of an uncertain future and disempowerment will do all they can to avoid going to hospital however many broken bones they have, however ill they are or however distressing their health condition is.
Perhaps that is exactly what the morally void government and conscienceless NHS want.
