An admission from the Health Secretary that the Scottish government did not understand social care sufficiently at the advent of covid-19 is “important”, but ‘decades of failure’ are to blame for the storm that hit Scotland’s care homes and not just the mistakes of the past year, says the head of Scottish Care.

The comments from Dr Donald Macaskill come after Health Secretary Jeane Freeman made the remarks in an interview with the BBC.

“The Cabinet Secretary was at least open and honest in her comments this week,” he says, “when she reflected that ‘our failures were not understanding the social care sector well enough, so we didn’t respond quickly enough to what was needed in our care homes but also in social care in the community’.

“She went on in her interview to say ‘we didn’t take the right precautions to make sure that older people leaving hospital going into care homes were as safe as they could be and that was a mistake. Now, I might argue we couldn’t do anything other than we did and all the rest of it, but it still created a real problem for those older people and for the others who lived in care homes and for the staff who worked in care homes.’

“For the thousands of staff and managers who with dedicated professionalism were on the frontline, these words are important.

“They have within them a recognition that strategic decisions had a profound local impact. But the words and acknowledgement of mistakes will have little consequence if we do not act on them and learn to do things differently in the future.

“Undoubtedly, we know a lot more about the virus today than we did in early March 2020. Anyone who thinks that frontline staff and care services have been waiting for an Inquiry or a Report to ‘learn lessons’ is naïve.

“The painful insights brought about by such a terrible and tragic loss of life have resulted in many dramatic changes to the care sector. There has been a huge increase in support and in many instances real partnership working to keep people safe.

“The second wave whilst still traumatic was very different in its impact because of the lessons that have been learnt.

“Thousands contributed their honest insights to [the social care] report, and it deserves to be implemented as a legacy to the trauma and all the mistakes we have all made.”

“But what is most important in the coming days is that social care becomes an issue of serious debate and not political point-scoring. We have in the Feeley Report published in January a vision of a future where social care is treated as of equal measure and importance as the NHS, grounded in the creation of a National Care Service.

“Thousands contributed their honest insights to that report, and it deserves to be implemented as a legacy to the trauma and all the mistakes we have all made.

“But already the wagons of self-interest are being circled to defend the status quo, to keep things largely unaltered, to defend the failed and broken systems of the past. The shameful failures of the last decades are at the root of social care’s fragility in the pandemic not just the mistakes of the last year.

“Those culpable for the failure to enact progressive legislation which was designed to give citizens real control over their care cannot be allowed to block a desire to not just learn the lessons of the pandemic but to hear the voices of all those who have worked in and used social care support.

“We need to elevate our social care system so that no-one will ever again have to acknowledge a failure to understand a sector which gives life and meaning to so many of our fellow citizens.”

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