The lack of accountability for the tens of thousands of Covid-related deaths of disabled people receiving care in their own homes and residential settings has caused lasting harm, the UK Covid inquiry has been told.
In their opening written submission to the 10th and final module of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry – on the pandemic’s impact on society – three national disabled people’s organisations (DPOs) said many deaths remained un-investigated, particularly in England and Wales.
Despite tens of thousands of Covid-related deaths of disabled people who had been reliant on care or health workers, the number of all deaths reported to coroners in England and Wales in 2020 was the lowest since 1995, partly because of easements to requirements around the registration of deaths and reporting by medical practitioners.
Among the matters left under-investigated was whether the use of inappropriate “do not attempt cardiopulmonary resuscitation” notices and “clinical frailty score” assessments led to preventable deaths.
In Scotland, there was an increase in reported deaths because of the work of the Covid-19 Deaths Investigation Team, although this was limited to deaths linked to employment and residential care.
The three national DPOs – Disability Rights UK, Inclusion Scotland and Disability Action Northern Ireland – told the inquiry in their opening oral submission last week that disabled people were “far more likely to die from Covid-19 than non-disabled people”, and people with Down’s syndrome could have been more than 30 times more likely to die from the virus.
But they said there was “never a point in the pandemic when government and public authorities properly scrutinised the detail of these deaths in terms of their relevant impairments and circumstances, let alone examine their preventability”.
They told the inquiry, through their barrister, Kate Beattie: “Rather than continuing or even enhancing the reporting and investigation of deaths of disabled people, at a moment when people were dying in dependent situations outside hospitals in numbers unknown in living memory, the formal reporting of deaths reached a historic low.
“The various health and care monitoring bodies did not necessarily inspect and did not prioritise site visits, and if deaths were reported, the holding of inquests was minimised without the anxious scrutiny which was warranted by these unparalleled circumstances.
“The outcome, as recounted by the Covid Bereaved Families for Justice and others, was a failure of accountability to disabled people who were bereaved, to non-disabled people who were grieving the deaths of their disabled loved ones, and to disabled people more generally.”
She added: “The legacy is a terrible human cost for those denied the opportunity to establish truth so that a person can properly begin to grieve it.”
The DPOs also told the inquiry that the government needed to “acknowledge the importance of disabled people’s rights and the failure to do enough to protect those rights” by incorporating the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities into UK law and introducing new laws that would “embed accessibility across all aspects of life”.
And they stressed the importance of “effective and properly funded co-production” of policy with disabled people, intersectional organisations and DPOs, as well as “far greater understanding of the social model and of intersectional experiences that mean that certain societal groups are far more marginalised than others”.
Giving oral evidence to the inquiry this week, Dr Pauline Nolan, head of participation and policy at Inclusion Scotland, said that a survey by her organisation in April 2020 showed that 30 per cent of respondents said their usual social care support had been “either stopped completely or reduced, sometimes overnight or without any warning” in the early months of the pandemic.
And, she said, disabled people had been “really anxious about not getting social care support recovered after the pandemic because they were seen to manage”.
She said that at least 28,000 recipients of domiciliary care in England and Scotland had died by May 2021..
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https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/inquiry-hears-how-lack-of-accountability-for-disabled-peoples-covid-deaths-caused-lasting-harm/
