Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will share time and will take the first five minutes.

Yesterday, hundreds of pages of correspondence between Nursing Homes Ireland and the State were released. They paint a very dark picture of staff having to use painter's overalls and goggles from local schools to protect themselves; of four-week delays in testing; and of no voice on NPHET or even on the subgroup looking at nursing homes. The Minister said to me recently that HIQA was its voice. I put that to HIQA yesterday at the Special Committee on Covid-19 Response. HIQA said it was not the voice of nursing homes on those groups.

The correspondence is damning when it comes to patients being transferred from hospitals to nursing homes. It began in early March. It began before there was guidance in place for the testing of those patients, before there was guidance in place for nursing homes on how to care for those patients, and before nursing homes had the PPE needed to care for those patients.

When some nursing homes refused, the HSE wrote to them on 6 March. Here is one of the things it concluded. It concluded that there were no grounds for greater concerns about discharges from hospitals at that time, as every possible risk assessment and medical assessment necessary would have been carried out before the patient was confirmed suitable for discharge. That was before any guidance was issued.

The guidance was issued four days later, on 10 March, and it was sobering. Patients from hospitals that have Covid patients, but where Covid has not spread around the hospital, were not tested and were not isolated. Regarding patients from hospitals where there were Covid patients and Covid was spreading through the hospital, if those patients were asymptomatic, they were not tested. If they were not a close contact of a Covid patient, they were not even isolated.

If they were in a hospital where there were Covid patients and where Covid was spreading, and they were a close contact of one of those Covid patients, they were not tested; they were just isolated for a few days. The representatives of nursing homes asked for stricter measures and said that the guidance contained "no practical guidance to nursing homes on how to reduce the risk of transmission" or to inform regarding the procedures to care for residents or staff who may present with symptoms. No information was provided with regard to accessing PPE. The nursing homes were screaming for help. On the same day of that guidance, NPHET actually advised that the visitor restrictions that nursing homes themselves had put in place were unnecessary. That is where NPHET was.

A week later the Minister launched the Government's 60-page action plan, which mentions nursing homes once. The only mention of nursing homes was that they were somewhere that patients should be discharged to. That was it. As of today, 884 women and men have lost their lives in nursing homes due to Covid. It is over half the total number of fatalities. Does the Minister accept that the transfer of non-tested and non-isolated patients from hospitals with Covid in them most likely contributed to those clusters happening in nursing homes? Will he commit to finding out how many of those outbreaks in the nursing homes were likely to have come from the patients who were transferred?

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