Category Archives: Social care

Carers, Covid19, disability, Helping the community, Uncategorised, Volunteers, Your councillor

Forget Carers Week – nobody cares

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Last week  – National Carers Week – passed with even less than its usual muted tootle.

Not sure why. The pandemic has meant that unpaid carers are busier, lonelier, more stressed, less supported  than ever. Maybe everyone was clapped out for the ‘real’ carers – you know, the ones we pay.

Carers Week is generally when those lucky enough not to be carers briefly acknowledge their plight, and then forget it again. This year we didn’t even bother to remember.  The official hashtag #carersweek is matched by the unofficial #realcarersweek. Have a look: it is very illuminating. I’ve spent twenty years watching paint dry when it comes to raising awareness of the very existence of unpaid carers and their lives. It’s dispiriting.

Putting national apathy aside  (and it was total)  all I can imagine is that everybody in Britain  – including our Prime Minister – is unaware of the void of difference between care workers (staunch, hardworking, poorly paid – but, crucially, paid) and unpaid carers, whose invisible lives are defined by high levels of ill-health (both physical and mental), poverty, stress and isolation. Carers are seven times more likely to be really lonely compared with the general public.  Carers are in effect slaves, held hostage by love, saving the state billions. Many work 24/7 without a break for months, maybe years at a time. Unpaid carers have no pay, no sick leave (let alone sick pay), no holiday (let alone holiday pay), no employers pension contributions

Suffolk doesn’t even know how many unpaid carers it has – old couples locked behind doors, children worried sick that a parent may be collapsed when they get home, a sibling trying to keep a family  member safe.

We do know that we have about 100,000 of them, because unpaid carers make up 13% of the population.

This year, lockdown gave everyone a sudden taste of being shut up involuntarily, unable to get out, unable to contact friends, losing livelihoods, careers, opportunities, very stressed, very concerned, very worried. And, like becoming a carer, it happened in a flash.

I am calling on the people of Suffolk – and those who represent them – to think what it would be like being locked down for life – for love. Without all the food parcels, the zoom quizzes, the sudden support networks and all the initiatives that are on offer now that sudden loss of of so much has hit the zeitgeist.

Clap for the carers? “Oh, of course  we mean you you too.” Clap for no pay, no sick leave, no holiday, no work-related pension, no union representation – because you only work. You are not counted as workers.

Are the carers charities  finally going to lobby to make real improvements to unpaid carers lives?  Lobby for pay, sick leave, holiday entitlement, work-related pension contributions (because, sure as hell, carers work their socks off)? £67 Carers Allowance for the few, and a dismissive pat on the head for all is simply not enough!

This is the time to admit to and take responsibility for those hidden 100,000, many of whom – appallingly – we still can’t identify, still living lives of quiet desperation behind closed doors, whether the lockdown eases or not.

And having -finally – taken responsibility for them, we must be morally obliged to do something to make their lives better.

Buses, Care homes, Covid19, Rail, Social care

Covid – when should we wear masks?

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Two older people wearing medical facemasks and giving a victory signFinally, at long last, masks will be MANDATORY on UK public transport from 15 June. Far too late of course – as is to be expected from this craven, risk-averse, milquetoast, chumocratic apology for a government – but hoo-blinking-ray anyway.

Masks help reduce covid transmission and so protect not only passengers but drivers.

33 bus drivers have died in London to date.

Why has this diktat taken so long?  Well, you see, “masks undermine social distancing. Everyone knows that!” But everyone also knows that when the wind changes, your face stays that way. And eating crusts makes your hair curl.

Things everyone knows are not always true.

This week I challenged Suffolk’s Director of Public Health, Stuart Keeble, to supply the scientific evidence for the whole “masks undermine social distancing” story – which has been peddled in the UK at all levels. I called it an “urban myth”. He denied this. But has yet to come back to me with any scientific evidence whatsoever.

On the other side, Dr Greenhalgh – an Oxford Professor of Primary Care and passionate advocate of  mask-wearing to reduce community transmission – has recently published this peer reviewed paper analysing the evidence behind counter arguments and shows it to be (at best) weak:  Face coverings for the public: Laying straw men to rest //onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jep.13415

When I blogged in March (yes, you heard it, MARCH) on how to make your own masks– stating clearly they helped reduce transmission rather than infection and were particularly useful in taking pressure off scanty PPE supplies (and that the pattern was approved by local medics) – o lord, what a fuss there was from local keyboard experts! (A lot of the arguments that were made about this – now far from- controversial idea, are addressed and put to bed in Dr Greenhalgh’s paper.)

Yet it turns out from Suffolk’s latest figures on covid infection in care homes, that the virus must have come in via people from outside: visitors, deliveries, staff.  Care homes were briefed fully on infection control. Transmission was their Achilles heel. Why were they, why were we not alerted to the benefits of wearing masks? The course of the pandemic might have run differently.

Graph showing correlation between mask wearing and infection rates in 4 countries: highest infection per day no masks- UK. Lowest infection and a tradition of masks, Taiwan

Here is an interesting table showing the path of infection in 4 countries – and when each made mask-wearing compulsory. Imagine if everybody in the UK had started wearing facemasks on the day I had blogged – instead of passing on remarks about incorrect usage (really, how hard is it to cover your nose and mouth?),  how they reduced social distancing and so on.

Imagine, if instead of criticising Asia, we in the UK had taken a steer from them, and implemented face covering for all as well as hand washing and social distancing. I would then have not have been receiving emergency masks from anxious friends in China to give to all of us poor Suffolk people they saw as vulnerable and unprotected.Facemasks

 

Care homes, Covid19, Social care, Uncategorised

Suffolk Care Home Outbreaks

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EU compliant PPE sent as a gift to Woodbridge from friends in China. The world has worried about us

Suffolk’s LibDem, Green and Independent group have been  regularly quizzing those in charge of the County’s Social Care and Public Health about  the state of Suffolk care homes. We have been increasingly concerned  about the high proportion of Suffolk Care homes with Covid outbreaks (much higher than in Norfolk or Cambridgeshire).

I first raised the issue of peripatetic care staff back in mid-April.  Does county keep records of carers and other staff moving between different care locations?  My concern was that carers and support staff might unwittingly spread infection between these locations.  If you only test people with symptoms (and then only those in hospital), we were clearly likely to miss out on routes of transmission.
The answer? No records were kept:  that infection  control is managed best  through proper use of PPE . It was therefore more effective to monitor use of PPE rather than monitor staff movements, I was told.
But of course the advice to care homes  was to rely on handwashing and professionalism in most situations. Minimal  PPE was required, unless Covid-19 had been diagnosed.  And tests only happened in hospital. So what sort of answer was that?
Again – as with mask usage – it seems that there has been a desire at all levels to confuse the issue of infection and transmission –  and to assert that handwashing and professionalism  is  enough of a defence against coronavirus, no matter where peripatetic staff  may travel in the course of a day.
Now I do not question for one moment the professionalism. I absolutely believe in the handwashing. But there has been an abnormally high  level of outbreak in Suffolk care homes. Clearly we needed more.
Today my group has taken our outrage to the press:
 
“Failing to test patients being discharged from hospital, and then placing these patients into care homes, is irresponsible beyond belief. We are very concerned that this occurred in Suffolk, and that this seems to account for the much higher proportion of Suffolk care homes with outbreaks compared to Norfolk and Cambridge,.”
“Even if this was allowed by national policy, the CCGs did not themselves consider the risks to our care home residents. Their decision to block-book beds in care homes to facilitate the discharge of patients from hospital is equally to blame.
“Care homes have been the hidden crisis of this pandemic. It is shocking  that elderly care home residents, who are in the high-risk category and should have been fiercely protected by the authorities, have instead been exposed to the virus.
The risks to care homes were clear from countries like Italy, and yet this Government failed to learn from their experiences and instead put care homes directly into danger by allowing hospitals to discharge potentially infectious patients.”
In Suffolk we didn’t do nearly enough to stop this.