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The Health Services Executive (HSE) has taken over the management of a nursing home in North Kerry, after finding the facility in “chaos” during a recent Covid-19 outbreak.
The HSE took over the management of Oaklands Nursing Home, Derry, Listowel, on Thursday evening following a court order requested by the Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa) due to serious infection control concerns .
Nineteen residents and staff at the Co Kerry nursing home tested positive for Covid-19 earlier this month. When an HSE team entered the facility on November 4 after the outbreak, “they found a center in the chaos,” Susan Cliffe, Hiqa’s deputy chief inspector of social services, told the Listowel District Court.
No empty rooms were collected for patients who could test positive for Covid-19 and all staff were in contact with all patients. Household cleaning products were still in use, and not Covid-19.
Residents “wandered unsupervised” through the nursing home, and those who had tested positive for Covid-19 were mingling with residents who did not have Covid-19, he said. “The alarm bells should have gone off at this facility and it didn’t happen,” Ms. Cliffe told the court.
There was no adequate oversight of the care of residents and there were no restrictions or controls for people entering the nursing home, the regulator said.
Judge David Waters said that, given the poor clinical governance and infection control measures, he was satisfied that there was a “serious risk to the lives and well-being of the people at the center.” The nursing home, which can house 51 residents, had been run by a private provider, Bolden (Nursing) Ltd.
Bolden Ltd, was not represented in court. However, there was consent to Hiqa’s request to cancel the nursing home registration.
There had already been “a high level of concern” this year about the home that had undergone seven inspections, the court heard.
Meanwhile, officials from the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) have expressed concern that the first progress in reducing the number of Covid-19 cases has stabilized.
Speaking on Thursday, the state’s medical director, Dr. Tony Holohan, said the country had indeed “lost a week” of lockdown, as recent figures showed the number of new cases was no longer declining.
Dr. Holohan said he was concerned that people would ignore instructions to work from home unless necessary, with anecdotal evidence showing parking lots and office dining rooms are “full,” he said.
Professor Philip Nolan, chairman of the Nphet modeling group, said the fact that progress in suppressing the disease has stalled is cause for “concern and disappointment”.
The R number, which is the rate of reproduction of the disease, had increased in the last week from 0.6 to between 0.7 and 0.9, which was a “major cause for concern,” said Professor Nolan.
Senior government officials also expressed concern about the daily Covid-19 figures and believe that they are not falling at a satisfactory rate.
“This is going in the wrong direction,” a source said Thursday night. Another Cabinet figure said that any prospect of moving to Level 2 sometime in December was becoming less and less likely and that the current plan was to move to “more Level 3” as long as the numbers did not deteriorate.
The Cabinet will wait to see what the trend is next week before making a final decision on what will happen on December 1, when the six-week shutdown is due to come to an end.
There is growing skepticism among some Ministers about the effectiveness of the Level 5 restrictions as recent progress has stalled. There will be a push from some Ministers next week in the Cabinet to look beyond the daily figures and take into account the level of hospitalizations and intensive care admissions.
Ultimately, however, they believe that the deterioration of progress in daily numbers will have a knock-on effect on the kind of reopening they can approve for December and Christmas.
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