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Four out of every five nursing homes in the State reported at least one confirmed Covid-19 case among residents or staff last year, the Stateâs health service regulator has said.
The Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa) said in its 2020 annual report that 82 per cent of nursing homes had at least one case of the coronavirus disease and there were 702 outbreaks reported across nursing homes during the year.
A third of nursing homes reported at least one outbreak, while almost another third reported two outbreaks during the year; 1 per cent of nursing homes reported five outbreaks.
Notifications of unexpected deaths received by Hiqa jumped to 1,833 during 2020 compared with 706 the previous year, an increase of 259 per cent as a result of the pandemic.
Psychological help needed over nursing home deaths, regulator says Care home staff, residents and families of deceased ‘traumatised’ by pandemic
Fri, Mar 5, 2021, 17:04
‘Some families are traumatised by the knowledge that their family member passed away possibly with nobody there beside them,’ says Hiqa deputy chief inspector Susan Cliffe. File photograph: iStock
Nursing-home staff, surviving residents and relatives of residents who died from Covid-19 will require psychological help after the trauma of the pandemic, a care regulator has said.
Susan Cliffe, deputy chief inspector of the Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa), said that, coming out of the third wave of infections, the effect of the pandemic on nursing homes and their staff who cared for residents for years, as well as relatives of the deceased, had been traumatising.
Sonas has claimed it took over two weeks for testing to occur after the first resident with symptoms was identified.
The nursing home group claims chief inspector of social services Mary Dunnion failed to take this delay into account in making her findings.
It also claims the failure of a HSE Outbreak Control Team to offer staffing support, when so many workers were out with the virus, was not taken into account in the report.
The group, which operates 11 nursing homes and four retirement villages around the country, fears the publication of the report would cause “grave reputational damage”. It was due to have been published on the website of the Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa) last October, but this did not occur after Sonas indicated that judicial review proceedings would be brought.
Cleaning products being used in the home were not appropriate to keep the home safe. One staff member was instructed not to clean a resident s room who had been transferred to hospital, inspectors noted. The resident was transferred back into the still uncleaned room on November 4, the records state. By then the facility was in the grip of a Covid-19 outbreak.
Staff failed to recognise Covid-19 symptoms in residents. The IT system, with all the residents symptoms and care records, failed over three days during the outbreak and there was no back-up.
The records also show the disquiet that followed the HSE s decision to pull out of Oaklands 12 days after sending in a crisis team to manage the escalating outbreak.