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Covid: Matt Hancock’s DHSC prioritised NHS ‘to detriment of care homes’ [1]
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Date: 2023-06
The UK government knew as early as September 2020 that its desire to free up hospital beds in the early stages of the pandemic had been “to the detriment” of care homes, openDemocracy can reveal.
It is one of a number of explosive admissions in a highly secret Covid “lessons learned” review document that was released tonight following a two-year transparency battle between the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and openDemocracy.
Ministers have publicly maintained they “threw a protective ring” around adult social care and “specifically sought to safeguard care homes” even after losing a high-profile court case last year over their failures. But behind closed doors, the department admitted the “operational response centre” (ORC) at the heart of the government’s Covid response had prioritised hospital capacity and failed to fully understand social care.
“The unprecedented speed with which this new virus emerged inevitably focused attention primarily on how the NHS would be able to cope,” reads the draft document, which is marked “OFFICIAL SENSITIVE”. “This prioritisation of the protection of hospital capacity, without adequate acknowledgement of key interdependencies, was to the detriment of ASC [adult social care].”
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The review also reveals the precarious staffing levels of the ORC itself as the disease crept towards Britain. As late as February 2020, 37% of shifts in the unit – also called the “incident response team” – were unfilled because civil servants who had received special training for emergencies could not get permission from their bosses to be released from regular work.
The DHSC carried out the review, dated September 2020, “as an informal, internal-only” overview of the first wave of the pandemic.
It used a “mixture of interviews with senior figures”, including “stakeholders” outside the department, and a survey that received 276 responses from across the DHSC. According to the DHSC, the review was not intended for publication, was not finalised, and “remains in draft form”.
Under the heading ‘Organisation’, the review says staff worked slower because the department did not have the right software: “The lack of a collaboration document management system, such as SharePoint or Google Drive, impacted teams’ ability to work at pace.”
In a passage that is likely to catch the eye of data privacy campaigners, the review also criticises Foundry, the controversial database software provided to the NHS by digital giant Palantir – saying even health secretary Matt Hancock was unable to use it.
“There is no single departmental overview of the range of available [DHSC] datasets, their origins, ownership and structure and the governance arrangements relating to access to those datasets,” the review states. “NHSE created the ‘Foundry’ data sharing platform to partially address these issues but staff (and the Secretary of State) experienced access issues and its utility as a central resource was limited.”
Palantir initially offered its services to the NHS for just £1, openDemocracy investigations revealed at the time, but subsequently won contracts worth £22m after getting its foot in the door. openDemocracy successfully sued the government over the deal and secured a vow that it would not work with the CIA-backed ‘spy tech’ firm again without consulting the public – a promise that was not kept.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/secretive-covid-lessons-learned-review-transparency-fight/
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