It has been revealed that a 2015 exercise that tested how Scotland could respond to a flu pandemic did not include anyone from the social care sector.

Scottish Care has described the omission of social care providers and representatives from the operation, which was titled Silver Swan, as a “major error and oversight”.

Care homes have emerged as a key area of concern, with one expert claiming not enough is being done to stop covid-19 “rampaging” through residential care institutions.

Speaking to Holyrood’s health committee this week, Health Secretary Jeane Freeman was asked about the Silver Swan exercise.

“I was not an MSP at the time, far less the health secretary. My understanding is that those [care] providers were not part of the exercise,” Ms Freeman said.

“All pandemic exercises—and any other exercises that are conducted to test security and resilience—involve the different levels of government.

The health secretary added: “Local government would have been involved in the exercise, but I do not think that individual care home providers, or that sector, were involved.”

Scottish Care CEO Dr Donald Macaskill, who represents most of the non-local-authority care services providers in Scotland, has told healthandcare.scot that this was a mistake:

“The social care sector and care providers should have been included in pandemic planning and the failure to include social care was a major error and oversight.”

Ms Freeman told MSPs that the government acted on the main conclusion of the 2015 war game was to create a national stockpile of PPE that could be used in a crisis.

But she said it had proved to be “not sufficient in some respects” because differences in how covid-19 spreads from person to person.

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