“We were left without armour in this battle.”
The words of the owner of a Tipperary nursing home as the treatment of those facilities during this pandemic was the subject of a special Oireachtas committee meeting yesterday.
Sandra Farrell runs Patterson’s Nursing Home in Roscrea and she says the sourcing of PPE was extremely difficult and many places were reliant on charity.
Speaking on Tipp Today, Sandra said she outlined the desperate situation to the Health Minister in a letter which went unanswered…
“878 older persons have died in nursing home care across the country [as a result of COVID-19]. And I will reiterate what I said – I wrote to the Minister on the 30th of March and I stated categorically to him.
“I said, what we require is PPE access immediately. I said, we need staff access for when we lose our staff during this pandemic. But also testing – I said we should be testing our own staff and residents from that period.
“We only got our own testing at the beginning of May… It was too late. We got it too late.”
Local man, Patrick Neill’s mother is in a nursing home at the moment.
He says he would like to see a date given for when people can visit their relatives in homes again.
He says it’s been a very tough couple of months:
“It just would be nice to sit and hold her hand, have a chat, a cup of tea, whatever. In these unprecedented times, everybody has concerns about their loved ones, especially when they’re in care homes and they’re not with you, that something may go wrong.
“Thankfully, at the moment Mum is very, very well but it’s a very worrying time.”
Sandra Farrell says there were about four to six weeks during this pandemic where nursing homes really had little to no PPE at their disposal and local hardware stores had even taken to dropping in the likes of masks and overalls to them.
She thinks government action was taken far too late:
“Last week I had my own HIQA inspection. They were coming to see was I Covid-ready…
“A lot of nursing home owners were so angry – it was just too little, too late. Coming now to see have we our contingency plans in place.
“They came to nursing homes that weren’t affected by Covid yet. And I say yet, because everyday I go into my nursing home taking a deep breath, thinking it could be today.
“Even though the numbers are down in the community, you just don’t know.”
