Discharging Covid-infected NHS patients to care homes was ‘completely clinically appropriate’, one of the government’s most prominent scientific advisers argued during the early days of the pandemic.
Days before the original March 2020 lockdown, Dame Jenny Harries wrote in an email that Britons carrying the virus should be sent to care homes if hospitals became overwhelmed.
Lady Jenny, now head of the UK’s Health Security Agency, claimed the NHS would decide who should still be in its care.
Grilled by today’s Covid survey, she admitted that her email ‘sounds terrible’.
But Dame Jenny insisted her advice would only apply if there was a ‘massive explosion of cases’ and not ‘an invitation to discharge Covid patients’.
Thousands of care home residents are feared to have died following a disastrous policy of discharging potentially infectious hospital patients without prior testing.
Professor Dame Jenny Harries (pictured), England’s former deputy chief medical officer, wrote in a March 2020 email that Britons carrying the virus should be discharged to care homes if hospitals become overwhelmed.
Dame Jenny told the inquiry she sent an email on March 16, 2020, describing the “bleak picture” and “horrible prospect” of what would happen if hospitals were flooded.
Dame Jenny told the inquiry she sent an email on March 16, 2020, describing the “bleak picture” and “horrible prospect” of what would happen if hospitals were flooded.
Her email exchange with Rosamond Roughton, an official at the Department of Health, was shown to the inquiry.
Ms Roughton had asked what the approach should be to discharging symptomatic people to care homes, adding: ‘My working assumption was that we should allow discharges and have very strict infection control? Otherwise the NHS is likely to become clogged with people who are not acutely ill.’
Ms Roughton added that this was a ‘major ethical issue’ for healthcare providers who were ‘understandably very concerned’ and were ‘already receiving inquiries from family members’.
In response, Dame Jenny emailed: ‘While none of us might want to plan for this prospect, I think the reality will be that we will have to discharge Covid-19 positive patients to residential care settings for the reason you have noted. .
‘This will be entirely clinically appropriate as the NHS will make a selection of those who need to remain in an acute setting and who could benefit from care from that sector.
‘The number of people with the disease will rise sharply within a fairly short space of time and I suspect this will make it a fairly normal practice and more acceptable, but I do recognize that families and care homes will not welcome this in the early stages.’
When Dame Jenny was asked about this email, she told the Covid Inquiry it “sounds horrible” but was intended to give “a very, very high-level view” of what would happen if there was a “massive explosion of cases’ would take place.
She said: ‘It was a very bleak picture because I think the reality was: this is not an invitation to discharge Covid patients, it is actually a reality that says that if hospitals are flooded…those who are physically well will to go. ‘
Dame Jenny later added that it was a ‘high-level overview of what came over the hill’ and should not be read as saying such a move was ‘fine’.
She said: ‘My message on the 16th… this was a look ahead and think ‘this is what will happen in due course’, there is no time frame in it.
‘You should not interpret my email as saying: ‘the NHS is suddenly going to discharge a lot of Covid-positive patients and that is absolutely fine’.
“What it did was paint a picture of the person who was on the official side of the Ministry of Health contributing to policy.”
She added: ‘I really want to emphasize that my email was a high-level view so people were aware of what was coming over the hill, but the hill was still some way away.’
Inquiry lawyer Andrew O’Connor then suggested there was ‘a degree of equanimity about discharging large numbers of Covid-19 patients in that very vulnerable environment’.
Dame Jenny responded: “If I may, I think that is an interpretation,” adding: “That was a very high level photo to, if you like, reinforce the position the country found itself in that weekend, and I think we’ve heard that in other places.
‘If people didn’t think about the likelihood of cases rising, as we’ve heard, I don’t think we can have sensible conversations about managing risk.
‘This is not a policy at all. This is a statement of, “If there is a pandemic in a country, how on earth do you deal with that exponential rise in cases?”
The survey later found that Dame Jenny does not believe face masks have slowed the spread of Covid.
She wrote in her witness statement to the inquiry that the evidentiary basis for the use of face masks in the community “was and remains to some extent uncertain.”
Dame Jenny warned that wearing masks may even have had the opposite effect, encouraging people to interact more closely with each other while wearing masks.
“There was a risk that in encouraging face masks, people would abandon what was really important, which was social distancing and all those other things,” she added.
