UK COVID-19 inquiry|3 Jul 2025

Prof. Vic Rayner OBE. National Care Forum.

NB: Session ran over into another video which i hadn’t seen hence this final version.

Introduction

Professor Vic Rayner OBE is the Chief Executive Officer of the National Care Forum joining the organisation in 2016. The NCF has been promoting quality care through the not-for-profit care sector for 29 years and has become a leading voice in the sector. The NCF represents 176 provider organisations and collectively provides care and support to over 260,000 adults, operating over 8,000 services within more than 56,000 care home places and employ 145,000 staff.

Most of the session focused on PPE, ventilation, testing and reform of the sector.

‘‘Testing was not available for the first wave of the pandemic, therefore providers could not be sure if someone had died from Covid-19 or with Covid-19 but they still had a legal duty to notify CQC, and they often included Covid-19 as part of the notification if they had the slightest suspicion.’’

-Paragraph 5.5c of statement

‘‘The Care Act 'easements' enabled local authorities to abandon some of their responsibilities to people under the Care Act, such as the requirement to assess applications for, and review of, eligibility for care. Officially, only a small number of local authorities applied to have the easements.’’

-Paragraph 4.27

‘‘However, in practice, our members suspect many more did in fact 'ease' their Care Act obligations.’’

-Paragraph 4.28

‘‘Our members were alert very early on to the very real impact that lockdown and visiting restrictions were having on the overall health and wellbeing of residents and their families.’’

-Paragraph 4.11

Testimony highlights

• Care home deaths were being underreported.

• No geriatricians allowed into care homes.

• Hospital discharges to care homes.

• Digital ‘connection.’

‘‘That’s an important part of the discharge discussion..most people within care settings have some generally fairly significant health requirements.’’

‘Flurry’ of blanket DNARs during lockdown-1

• Muliple GP practises issuing blanket DNARs for care homes.

‘‘All over 70’s in homes should be issued with DNAR.’’

‘‘I think these are probably happening all over the country.’’

‘‘It is essentially telling people they will be left to die.’’

Statement highlights

‘‘People in care homes and their loved ones in the community have fundamental human rights, both as individuals and as a community, and bans on visiting deny those rights.’’

-Paragraph 4.8

‘‘Do not discharge thousands of people into social care settings without a plan or additional support from clinicians in place for those people. The focus on freeing up hospital capacity led to several poor policy decisions at the beginning of the pandemic. The most serious of these was the mass discharge of people from hospitals into settings with vulnerable people, without testing or access to healthcare services. Due to the lack of testing, we cannot know the full impact of this policy on the lives of people in care settings.’’

-Paragraph 10.17v

‘‘Vaccination as a Condition of Deployment was a counterproductive policy which made some care workers more resistant to vaccination.

-Paragraph 10.22

Thanks for your attention.

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End