A Maltese doctor/priest in London has lashed out at the way elderly people are being left to die in Britain’s nursing homes instead of being offered care in hospitals.
Fr Patrick Pullicino volunteered to return to the National Health Service to work as a consultant at Nightingale Hospital for COVID-19 patients in London.
“If somebody in a nursing home gets COVID, you don’t leave them there. You have to monitor them, and if they get to a certain point you bring them into hospital. You don’t leave them to die with hypoxia and pneumonia and put them on palliative care in a nursing home,” he told the Catholic News Service and the Catholic Herald. “That’s not the way to deal with it, but that is what they are doing.”
Nightingale Hospital, built to house a maximum of 4,000 patients, treated just 51 in three weeks, with thousands of surplus beds in many other NHS hospitals.
Pullicino trained as a doctor in Malta and served as chairman of the Department of Neurology and Neurosciences at the New Jersey Medical School in 2001 before going to the UK in 2005. He retired from medicine 18 months ago and last year was ordained as a priest for the Archdiocese of Southwark, which covers South London and the county of Kent.
He told Catholic News Service that the excess beds can be explained by a policy of returning elderly patients from hospitals to care homes even if they have COVID-19.
The policy was so misguided that it should be the subject of a public inquiry, he said. “Mortality among the elderly in care homes has been terrible, with huge numbers of people dying.”
“It is not just a mistake — maybe it was a mistake — but there is no feeling for these people. The NHS has abandoned a lot of these elderly sick,” he said.
New UK care home death stats indicate higher toll
On Tuesday, Britain's Office for National Statistics y said more people have died from the coronavirus in the UK than the official national toll suggests, after more care home deaths were linked to the outbreak.
The ONS and regional health bodies registered 36,473 deaths from or mentioning COVID-19 up until May 1, in contrast to the government tally which said 27,510 people had died up to that day.
The government's rolling daily toll on Monday stood at 32,065, which already makes Britain the worst-affected country in Europe and the second-worst globally.
The ONS data showed that 8,312 people died in care homes across England and Wales by May 1.
But ONS statistician Nick Stripe said: "If we feed in the figures from... last week, there's about another 1,500, 1,600 notified.
"So that puts us close to 10,000 COVID-related deaths in care homes by May 8," he told BBC television.