Prof. Des O’Neill, a consultant geriatrician at Tallaght University Hospital in Dublin has claimed that what is playing out now in nursing homes with Covid-19 is the failure by successive minister for health to prioritise care for older citizens.
He insists that blame for the failure to prevent the catastrophic spread of the virus in care homes rests squarely at the doors of the Department of Health.
“This has been a crisis that has been long in the making,” Prof. O’Neill told Brendan O’Connor on RTÉ Radio One at the weekend.
“It relates back to policy issues around the Department of Health over the past 20 years.”
He said senior officials who make policy have overseen privatisation “without due attention to adequate support systems or engagement with the HSE or the nursing home sector”.
Prof. O’Neill warned that there is “not enough appropriate linkage into the public health system.
“The issue is around policy-making in the DOH, which has not adequately put into place linkages with the public health system…this has been absent in the nursing home sector, and not through any fault of the HSE or its staff.”
According to Prof. O’Neill – who wrote the Leas Cross report that revealed substandard living conditions in that home leading to the deaths of some patients – “They [staff in nursing homes] are working in a system that is not actually a system…This system has not been set up with any clarity in leadership or expectations.”
Editor Michael Kelly’s feature History will judge this Government on its neglect of our nursing homes