Matt Hancock has ‘forbidden’ use of blanket Do Not Resuscitate orders for the elderly, following reports of such DNRs being sent to elderly residents and care homes across the UK for over two weeks. We asked our readers: Is the government leading the way on policy to protect the elderly, or waiting to react to public concern? Resident Peter Williams responded to explain why he – like many others – is concerned about the government’s response to the Coronavirus.
This entire government was elected as a result of a criminally dishonest campaign, with a prime minister that has been sacked from more than one job for lying, so for me it’s hard to believe anything they say.
There are millions of care sector workers desperate to be tested, and daily, are publicly stating they are not. I believe them. The leader of Portsmouth City Council confirmed [on 15th April] only three tests per day for the entire city.
Government offer of COVID 19 testing for care home staff is 3 tests a day for the whole of the City of Portsmouth. This is far too little for care staff working in care homes and nursing homes here dealing with very vulnerable patients who are ill. Much more testing needed.
— Gerald Vernon-Jackson 🔶️ (@geraldvjuk) April 15, 2020
The government followed Dominic Cummings pseudo-science of herd immunity, and thousands are dead because of it. Had they wanted to protect society, they would have taken swift action in January, and prepared in the years before.
Had they wanted to safeguard the elderly – rather than see them as a burden on public resources, and then decimate local authority funding (much of which is used to fund adult social care, – Thank our local Conservative MPs for voting to do that every time) – the government could have prepared the NHS and others with the personal protective equipment, staff and resources they needed. They chose tax breaks for the super rich instead, many of which happen to be Conservative party donors.
Exercise Cygnus almost five years ago identified the severe risks the Conservatives’ policies had created: instead of acting to protect lives, build supplies, ventilator stock etc, Jeremy Hunt then continued to cut PPE resource. The Conservatives pursued Brexit and creating a hostile environment for immigrants, further reducing by tens of thousands the care workers, nurses and doctors, and leaving a reported shortfall. [Unison reports that there are 106,000 vacancies across the NHS in England, including over 44,000 vacancies in nursing].
If indeed the policy is to continue to develop the herd immunity, but pretend otherwise – and I sincerely hope that it is not the case – keeping the elderly, unproductive members of the herd in care homes and letting them die early certainly saves money on care costs while keeping intensive care bed capacity available for ‘the workers’. We know in 2017, in a bid to cut the public funding of care costs even further, the Conservatives sought to introduce a policy of funding care services through forcing the sale of their homes in the form of equity release (by some coincidence that particular financial services sector also include large donors to party funds).
The numbers dying every day because of the government failure to take action early in January is scandalous. In a corporate environment, those that failed to take actions to safeguard health and safety would be facing a prison sentence.
Instead of public outrage, our government is instead rewarded with large numbers saying they will vote for them again.
I can’t get my head around that one.
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