Covid-19 Response

Olivia Blake Excerpts

Monday 18th May 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

That is one of the many balances we will have to strike in the months and years to come as we recover from covid-19. There are, immediately, three things we are doing on that. The first is that we have brought in more staff, especially retired staff, and we want to keep them. They have been absolutely brilliant and a huge help to the NHS during the crisis. The second is providing more support to staff. I mentioned the mental health support, but this involves all sorts of other, wider support to staff right across health and social care. The third thing is making sure that we rebuild the NHS, gaining from the improvements that have been made in the eye of this storm, because there have been improvements to ways of working. Huge strides forward have been taken on the use of technology, and we have found areas where that has made a very big positive impact. Although there are, of course, parts of this crisis response that we want to roll back, there are other parts we want to pick up and take forward.

[Olivia Blake (Sheffield, Hallam) (Lab) [V]]

My constituent Rebecca’s mother tragically died from coronavirus while working as a nurse in a Rotherham care home. The care home did not have access to the personal protective equipment she needed to keep safe. Rebecca wants to know: how will the PPE available to health and care professionals who have died in service be recorded and considered? Will accepting the £60,000 death-in-service payment prevent her family from making a negligence claim? And who signed off on the Government’s strategy of sending untested patients to care homes?

[Matt Hancock]

As I have said, in care homes we put in place infection control procedures as much as was possible at the start of this crisis, and there was not an increase in the number of people going back to care homes. But my heart goes out to the family of the hon. Lady’s constituent, who died working in social care, joining, I am afraid to say, many others who gave service during this crisis and died as a result of it. I am very happy to look specifically into her constituent’s case. We do look into the death of any health or social care worker and make sure we get to the bottom of all the lessons that can be learned, and I am very happy personally to do that in the case of the constituent that the hon. Lady has rightly raised.