Covid care home tragedy: we, the bereaved, need to know the full truth

I was relieved to see, in letters (30 May), the truths gradually emerging on the care home tragedy. The unspeakable duty-of-care failure of both the NHS and the Department of Health and Social Care has often been described as returning elderly patients to “their care homes” untested for Covid. Yes, that was bad enough. But what they also did was even worse. They billeted many of them, whose beds they were told were now needed, to care homes they did not in fact come from. Untested. The NHS complied with the DHSC directive and so did the care homes. They did not want to, but they did. I am among the traumatised bereaved. She was rapidly killed via an infected and untested incomer. All the staff could do was to weep as, pitifully poorly protected themselves in those first couple of weeks, they saw their loved long-term charges and some of their colleagues die one by one. Something they will never recover from. We need a thorough investigation of where that billeting directive originated, and exactly who thought that was ethical. That is owed to us.
Susan Hemmings
London

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