Care home cull enquiry

Its over a month ago I first mentioned the care home cull and while its good that its now being picked up and the blame is being thrown around, let's just stop and concentrate on the virus first.

The problem lies with care being a business. These are quite simply incompatible if businesses are allowed to fold when they cant meet the care standards. They shouldn't be allowed to open if they dont have deep enough pockets to get into the game.

The care game is like insurance. There is unlikely to be a pandemic more than every X years, but when there is one all the profits from years gone, by need to go against the huge losses faced this year.

I dont think that will happen, they'll just close down, cut therir losses and move their debt mountain/capital on to a shell company of their choosing.

Legally when the enquiry happens in 2021 lots of time will be spent chasing this money, the investors and yet those who profited during the good years have already banked and spent that money, the cash reserves are no longer within many of these organisations which is why they will fail.

I think we need to look at it differently.

We should start not at the care homes where the deaths occurred but at the care homes where they were prepared.

Instead of giving care homes 5 stars, we should ask them why they were prepared.

We should ask if they started buying PPE when news of the pandemic broke in China or if they routinely carry large quantities of stock.

We should ask what measures they had in place for their staff and was it those measures that ensured they kept their staff and residents safe.

We should ask when did they go into lockdown, was it before France and Spain or if they waited along with the government. The care industry had no reason to wait as I see it, so telling visitors it was for the safety of all residents was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

We should ask all the questions we like, but then we should ask them what we should be asking of government, of other care home providers and how the sector should be governed. This government (UK or Scotland) believes in self government and whether its breaking from Brussels or London, the best care homes should be telling us how the care industry should be run, not politicians who have no chance of understanding such complicated issues without any idea of the technical and logistical constraints.

That's what I hope for in 2021, but the best care homes will probably just want to get on with being the best and that means looking after their staff and caring for their residents.