REVEALED: The Scottish Governnent directly oversaw and signed off the purchase of care home beds for patients transferred from hospitals across Scotland, before mandatory testing.

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Local areas across Scotland were asked to submit ‘mobilisation plans’ to Scottish Government

These included buying up care home beds for hospital patients to free up NHS capacity.

This was long before it was required to test patients on discharge.

The Scottish Governnent approved all the plans.

However it won’t disclose how many care home beds it signed off on.

And to my knowledge the plans are not published.

Inverclyde has published some information.

Documents make clear the ‘key priority’ was hospital capacity.

10 of the 14 care homes there agreed to take hospital patients.

50 beds were bought. The £2m cost was approved by Health Secretary Jeanne Freeman herself.

As early as March 13 Scottish Government was aware of concerns about the of sending patients to care homes without tests.

The guidance states clearly the priority was ‘maximising hospital capacity.’

The March 13 Scottish Government guidance says patients should be clinically screened and not transferred ‘inappropriately’ but flows from hospitals to care homes shouldn’t be ‘hindered’ and where appropriate ‘expedited’ i.e. sped up.

Scottish Governnent Guidance from March 26 said hospital patients being discharged to care homes did not need a ‘negative COVID test’.

The guidance wasn’t updated until May 15.

Charlie Allan is the manager of a care home in Hamilton that had no cases when it took a patient from hospital in March.

There was a COVID19 outbreak at the home soon after. One resident died.

They don’t know if the outbreak at the home was seeded by the hospital patient because that person wasn’t tested on discharge.

Charlie speaks highly of his NHS colleagues and his own staff for containing the virus and becoming COVID-free again.

At this point I’d like to tell you what Health Protection Scotland (now PHS) guidance said at the time about the issues raised here.

I can’t because they’ve removed it from their website and will not disclose it.