Continued Petitions

The next and final petition, PE1841, which was lodged by Natasha Hamilton on behalf of Care Home Relatives Scotland, calls on the Scottish Government to allow a designated visitor into care homes to support loved ones.

Since the committee’s most recent consideration of the petition in December 2020, submissions have been received from the Coalition of Care and Support Providers in Scotland, Scottish Care, Anas Sarwar MSP and the petitioner. The submissions are summarised in the clerk’s note.

Since the publication of our papers we have received late submissions from the cross-party group on dementia and Christine Cusack in support of the petition. We have also received a late submission from the Scottish Government. Anas Sarwar has also been in contact to give his apologies. He emphasises, as he does in his submission, that he is keen that we look closely at the petition because, after a year, we need a better solution than the one we are currently using.

Pauline McNeill MSP has also been in contact to express her support for the petition and to say that some of the most devastating cases brought to her by constituents during the pandemic have been from families who find themselves unable to visit loved ones. We also have a submission from Monica Lennon MSP, expressing her support for the campaign.

In its submission, the Scottish Government states that it is committed to supporting further opportunities for opening up visiting in care homes, emphasising that the recommended restrictions for care homes have been the toughest decisions that ministers have had to make. It notes that the level 4 restrictions announced on 4 January serve as a reminder of the importance of balancing the welfare of residents and allowing people to visit safely, but stresses that the restrictions will not be kept in place any longer than is necessary.

The Scottish Government highlights the progress of the vaccination programme, with 99.7 per cent of residents in older adult care homes and 93 per cent of residents in all care homes having received their first vaccinations as at 9 February 2021. The Scottish Government also advises that the cabinet secretary has met directly with the petitioner and CHRS and has discussed their call for new legislation. The Scottish ministers believe the improvements that are currently under way present the quickest route to progressing visiting, but they have said that they will “explore all options”.

This is a very challenging and important petition. We know that petitions in Change.org and so on have accumulated a lot of support, but the campaign for this particular petition has been very strong. In my view, there is quite a gap between the guidance and the reality on the ground. I spoke to one person with a loved one in a care home, and they made two points. First, if it is supposed to keep older people safe, there is no evidence that it has worked, and there does not seem to be the same progress now that the vaccination is in place. Secondly, even when care homes allow visits, there are conditions that to me feel far from what anybody has intended.

11:30

It was described as being like a reptile house, where the carer comes in one side, the loved one comes in the other, but there is large Perspex screen, which is really the same as being outside because you cannot touch each other, or hold hands or give the reassurance that a loved one might want. That does not seem to me to be what was intended by the change in rules around access of a designated visitor to help support the care of a loved one. Care homes might have become risk averse just because of the seriousness of the issues.

In my view, we need to find a way of highlighting to the Government the scale of people’s anxiety and distress. In the circumstances, caution is causing a scale of distress that is only imaginable to those of us not in that position. I am interested in what other members have to say on this. We have had a lot of external interest but I note that we welcome back Neil Findlay for this discussion. I will come to all members, but I will take Neil Findlay first. I will make sure that we all have the opportunity to reflect on what can be done with the petition.

Thanks to the committee for giving me a bit of time this morning. Care home residents, families and members who have been working on this from the very start of the pandemic have done everything possible. As with the previous petition that I spoke about, they have come to the Public Petitions Committee only because they have tried everything. We have all seen emotive pictures of people outside care homes looking through windows in desperation at their loved ones, trying to have contact with them. I do not think that they brought the petition before the committee lightly.

We have had several meetings with the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Sport. I do not plead with the Government often, but I have pleaded for there to be some progress because the situation is so appalling. Infection prevention and control measures have not been used to facilitate contact; they have been used to prevent it. From the care homes’ perspective, having gone through the crisis, when we saw so many people dying—and some of the reported incidents have been truly appalling—I understand why they are taking such a precautionary approach. The advice and guidance from Government has been given repeatedly, but it often bears no relation to the reality on the ground, and many families have not had contact with their loved ones for more than a year.

In my own situation, my mum is in a care home 100 yards from my house. If one of the staff contracts Covid, the home puts in place a whole series of actions that mean that contact completely stops. At the moment, my contact is once on a Friday behind a screen for half an hour. That is not normal contact; that is not normal engagement with your loved ones. I do not criticise the care home one bit, but for people who have family with dementia, when a phone call is of no use and they have not seen the person or been in contact with them for around a year, it must be completely and utterly intolerable. I think these are very serious issues.

The families have done everything possible. We have had a human rights catastrophe in our care home sector, and it is on-going. I believe it is incumbent on the committee to do all it can to get the Government to move on this. We have asked for emergency legislation. I think there would be goodwill across all the political parties in Parliament to make that happen, but there has been resistance to it. For many of us, we think that all along the Government has been sitting it out, waiting on the vaccine and that has taken some time. My plea is that the committee does all it possibly can to put pressure on the Government to act now, because this has gone on far too long.

Thank you.

I advise members that Tom Mason has had to leave the meeting. He has another appointment and the meeting has run on longer than we expected because we have been looking at a lot of important and serious issues. Tom has expressed his concern about and support for the petition, recognising the issues himself, but he is unable to contribute further at this point.

There is a degree of urgency about this. I think that we should write directly to Professor Leitch and the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Sport to say just how urgent we think the situation is. If members do not agree with me, we can discuss that, but we should also emphasise that it is unacceptable to define as changes to access to loved ones in care some of the examples that we have been given. Those cannot be described as any kind of change; a means has simply been devised by which residents are still separated from their designated visitors.

I am not sure whether everybody got this email but I received an email from the person who is responsible for the change.org petition, who made a really powerful point. Often, loved ones go into a care home with the reassurance that they can treat it as their home, but as things changed for the rest of us in our homes when restrictions were lifted, that did not happen in care homes. For me, the concern behind that is that the Government wants to try to manage risk as much as possible, and this is a group for whom risk can be managed in a way that it cannot manage the risk that we all present every time that we go to a shop or whenever lockdown restrictions are reduced a bit.

Simply because groups of people in institutions can be more easily managed, it is important to understand that that should not mean that the difficult issues around those people exercising their rights should not be tackled. I feel strongly that, if we write to Professor Leitch, our messages from this meeting must not be about issuing guidance. The challenge is to issue guidance that makes a difference and a change, and which is not guidance that can be circumvented.

Neil Findlay made a point about the care home that he knows. This is not a criticism of care homes, but people who feel risk averse and hugely responsible need to know that they have been able to do the right thing because the Government has made that very clear to them.

We can see the scale of interest in the petition. The phrase “unprecedented times” has probably been overused in the pandemic, but I think that there is a sense of frustration and distress from families. There is a big gap between saying that we understand that there is a problem and making a specific difference to what people live with every day.

I hope that we can agree to write to the Scottish Government and to Professor Leitch as a matter of urgency, and to ask the Government, and Professor Leitch directly, to address the concerns reflected in the petition and the more general point that something needs to be done about the situation.

It may be that emergency legislation is required. It may be that that will come before Parliament in what is left of the session. However, the judgment will be whether that will deal with the situation faster, because I think that we are agreed that that is what we want to see.

Does any member want to make a further comment? I do not see anyone wanting to do so. In that case, we will continue the petition and to write to the cabinet secretary and Professor Leitch to emphasise the concerns that have been expressed to us and the need for urgency in responding to those concerns, and to say that if guidance is not matched by a real difference in the experience of families, it will have failed. If that is acceptable to members, we will agree to do that.

We thank the petitioners for what they have done. As with so many of our other petitions, we know that the petition has been driven by direct experience. In the middle of a pandemic, it is not easy to campaign when you are dealing with being unable to support your loved ones in the way that you would want and would normally be able to do.

I thank members. In particular, I thank Neil Findlay for attending the meeting and other members who have engaged with the committee today. I also thank the clerking team and the broadcasting team for bearing with my poor connection challenges.

Meeting closed at 11:45.