Planning for future pandemics focused too much on hospitals, leaving out care homes and community care in the process, the Royal College of Nursing has said.

It is claimed the omissions left community health and care workers struggling to access PPE in the early stages of the pandemic and resulted in policies being announced before the detail had been worked out.

The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) Scotland says all services, including independent care homes, should be included in emergency, or resilience, planning.

It emerged last month that a 2015 exercise testing how Scotland could respond to a flu pandemic did not include anyone from the social care sector.

Theresa Fyffe, head of RCN Scotland and a former deputy chief nurse, has previously said politicians had shied away from tackling problems in the care home sector before the pandemic because they were “too hard to do”.

In a report sent to MSPs, the college, which represents 40,000 nurses in Scotland, said community and care services are also “on the frontline of this crisis and yet are often overlooked.”

It told the Health and Sport Committee, which is considering how well-prepared Scotland was for the pandemic, there “has not been a whole system approach to planning”.

The document states: “We believe the serious challenges around accessing PPE that staff working in care homes and the community experienced, also illustrate the point that these sectors were not sufficiently considered in resilience plans.” 

“It is also worth noting that plans to rapidly scale up the nursing workforce nationally, including through the creation of a temporary register and deploying nursing students to the workforce, had not been worked out in detail in advance.

“There was a lot of activity across the UK on developing the details of these plans at the start of the pandemic, after measures had been announced, which resulted in a period of confusion, anxiety and uncertainty for members.”

In one example community nurses were asked to work in hospitals despite the urgent need for staff in essential services such as child protection and end of life care outside the acute sector.

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