Care home owner and husband were shocked at Mark Drakeford's decision to send patients into care homes without Covid testing

Martin Shipton

The owner of a care home whose husband took his own life because of the pressure of coping during the pandemic says they had been shocked when then First Minister Mark Drakeford said patients would be released back into care homes from hospital without being tested for Covid.

Earlier Helen Hougn and her husband Vernon, who ran a care home in Wrexham, had been appalled when told that older people would not be ventilated if they caught the deadly virus.

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'Bed blocking'

She told the UK Covid Inquiry: “My response was to the local health board, was the only way I would accept any patients from the hospital, would be if they came with a written negative Covid swab, and I wanted it in writing that it was -- it had come as a negative Covid swab. And the response I got was that that may not be possible to do that, and I said, ‘Well, they don't come’ and therefore my response was that they were going to report me to Care Inspectorate Wales for bed blocking.”

She told them: "You can report me to whoever you want but nobody is setting foot over my nursing home without a Covid swab and they didn't.”

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Pressure

Mrs Hough, a member of the Covid Bereaved Families for Justice Cymru group, told the Inquiry: “I did say to the local health board, ‘I hope you're not putting pressure on other homes like you are with me on managers, because managers may not be able to say 'No, we're not going to take people, or we're not going to take people only with a negative swab.'.’If you've got a homeowner that's got eight empty beds, then the owner may say, "We want them filled" regardless, whereas I had the choice to say, "No, they're not coming into my home." I'm not sure that every manager had that choice. I don't know, but I did say that I hope they weren't putting that pressure on them.”

She said pressure had been intense on her husband : “Unfortunately his workload increased dramatically because trying to get supplies in, he was having to queue at supermarkets and the cash and carry and things. Everything took so much longer. One day he came back and he'd been queueing at B&Q to get in for 2 hours for a ballcock to repair a toilet.

“Every single day this was.His workload did increase but also, what also affected him, but unbeknown to us, was he was watching this on the TV. Well, we both were. Every single day. There's a rule in the house that we don't normally put the TV on until 6 o'clock at night unless grandchildren were there. But this was in the morning until night. When we were watching what was developing every single day.

“And when Boris Johnson said they were going to test in care homes there was such a relief for us all to start being tested, and on that very same week, Mr Drakeford turned that around and said they won't be doing it in Welsh care homes, in Wales, because he didn't see ... well in fact his words were the resources would be better spent elsewhere. And we just … we just sat back in the chair, and he just said to me "What do we do now?" And I said I don't know. I don't know. We just keep working."

Distressing

Mr Hough saw people dying in the home in very distressing circumstances.

His wife told the Inquiry she tried to reassure her husband at various points, saying they would go on holiday..

But on May 21 2020, he said: ‘How are we going to go with this epidemic? With this pandemic? ‘And I said, ‘We put our gloves and masks on and we just go, we just go."

“Then on the Thursday, he'd gone to work, as he'd gone to work, he'd even fed his patients, he'd fed his patients and I thought he'd gone shopping and then the police came and told me that unfortunately he'd been found in the police car and he'd shot himself, in the police car park, in the car.”

Baroness Hallett, who is chairing the Inquiry, expressed her deepest sympathy to Mrs Hough and said she had been exceptionally brave to give evidence.