COVID-19: Changing Goalposts

The Mrs is currently scrabbling to comply with new guidelines released by the Care Quality Commission.

Over two months into the outbreak, the CQC has now issued an edict that registered care home workers should be wearing PPE at all times. Masks and gowns at all times and face shields when doing close personal care. Just like I was saying weeks ago.

The wife is now scrabbling to get supplies of PPE through from head office. She doesn't order it directly.

Of course if someone in the care home now contracts COVID-19 in between the edict being released yesterday and when the PPE actually arrives for use, guess who gets it in the neck?

Considering it was obvious two weeks ago and more that PPE should be worn as a barrier between carers and their clients, it's been a bloody long time coming. But of course the Mrs couldn't pre-empt any decision and buy PPE beforehand. She can only buy it now it's been deemed necessary.

Strangely it's only registered care homes. Other forms of care like supported living that work in exactly the same way are exempt from the PPE rules.

That's because they don't come under the CQC and any deaths are reported differently. They just get reported like deaths in the community.

Registered care homes count, (literally) because deaths are reported to the CQC and those statistics are collected by the ONS and are now starting to be reported on the news.

I can say quite cynically the deaths in registered care homes has shocked the government into action. Way too late.

It was quite obvious at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak that PPE should have been worn by carers as a barrier to them infecting care home residents and also a barrier to them being infected, as well as cross-infection between ill and healthy residents.

If it was good enough for hospital wards, it's good enough for care homes.

I hope the CQC will be taken to task on this.

I also hope it will show why the social care sector really needs to be classed as the same status as the NHS, if not absorbed into it.