Professor Dame Jenny Harries, England’s deputy chief medical officer during the Covid crisis and now head of the UK Health Security Agency, said she was describing the “bleak picture” and “top line awful prospect” of what needed to happen if hospitals overflowed.
But she added: “You should not take my email as to say, ‘the NHS is suddenly going to discharge lots of Covid-positive patients and that’s absolutely fine’.
“What it was doing was painting a picture to the person who was contributing to policy on the official side at the Department of Health.”
Discharging people to care homes – where thousands died of Covid has been one of the central controversies of the Government’s handling of the pandemic. Dame Jenny’s testimony came on the same day the inquiry heard from former Health Secretary and Chancellor Sajid Javid.
He said he resigned in February 2020 after feeling then Prime Minister Boris Johnson was “not in charge” and ex-chief adviser Dominic Cummings was “running the Government”. The inquiry was read an email exchange between Rosamond Roughton, an official at the DHSC, and Dame Jenny on March 16, 2020.
Ms Roughton asked what the approach should be around discharging symptomatic people to care homes, adding: “My working assumption was that we would have to allow discharge to happen, and have very strict infection control? Otherwise the NHS presumably gets clogged up with people who aren’t acutely ill.”
Ms Roughton added this was a “big ethical issue” for care home providers who were “understandably very concerned” and who were “already getting questions from family members”.
In response, Dame Jenny said in her email: “Whilst the prospect is perhaps what none of us would wish to plan for, the reality will be that we will need to discharge COVID-19-positive patients into residential care settings for the reason you have noted. This will be entirely clinically appropriate because the NHS will triage those to retain in acute settings who can benefit from that sector’s care.
“I do recognise families and care homes will not welcome this in the initial phase.”
Questioned at the inquiry yesterday, Dame Jenny said it “sounds awful” but was intended to provide “a very, very high-level view” of what would happen if there was an “enormous explosion of cases”.
She said: “It was a very bleak picture. This isn’t an invitation to be discharging Covid patients, it’s actually a reality that says if hospitals overflow, those who are physically well to go, will go.”
The inquiry continues.
