Government must end attack on rights

The Relatives & Residents Association has called for an end to the sustained attack on older people’s rights in care settings, saying the Government must show leadership and ensure work begins immediately on an overhaul of their guidance on visiting.

Yesterday, in response to the publication of the report by Sue Gray, the Prime Minister said “This pandemic was hard for everyone”. Speaking in the past tense, the Prime Minister seemed unaware that restrictions are far from over for people living in care; on the same day his government updated their guidance on visiting in care homes, reissuing many of the harshest restrictions. R&RA’s helpline hears frustration and anger that older people in care are being left behind whilst the rest of the country gets back to normal and is told to ‘live with the virus’.

To say it has been ‘hard’ comes nowhere near to recognising the devastation caused in care settings over the past two years. From Government mistakes putting people’s lives at risk from the virus, to the dramatic swing to the other extreme imposing the harshest restrictions in care, the harm caused has been catastrophic.

Six months after so-called ‘freedom day’, guidance on visiting in care homes still contains the most damaging restrictions on people’s movement and contact. A quarantine period is still required after emergency hospital stays – this blanket rule, only applying to those living in care settings, is unfair, discriminatory and deeply damaging to older people’s wellbeing. The Government has ignored calls from the sector – even from care providers – to amend the definition of an outbreak (it remains two cases within a two-week period) which is leading to harmful isolation periods often rolling on for several weeks if more cases are detected.

R&RA has been calling on the Government for months to overhaul its visiting guidance, to place the rights of people using care at its heart. Whilst we welcome the positive steps taken in this new guidance – such as the lifting on the number of visitors – we reiterate our call for a fresh approach. Government guidance should show leadership by starting from the position that care homes are people’s homes, and people living in care have the same rights as the rest of the country including to family life, liberty and autonomy.

Helen Wildbore, director of the Relatives & Residents Association, said:

“The Prime Minister seems to think the pandemic is over. This is very far from the case in care settings where the most damaging restrictions have been reissued despite reams of evidence of the harm being caused to older people’s lives and wellbeing.

The recognition from the Prime Minister that the past two years have been ‘hard’ comes nowhere close to capturing the catastrophic harm caused to people living in care and their families by the Government’s mishandling of the pandemic. The Government must now show leadership to end the sustained attack on older people’s human rights. Work must begin now to overhaul the visiting guidance, putting the rights of people living in care at its heart, before it is too late for too many more.”

More information about R&RA’s campaign to End Isolation In Care is available here