A report into how Kingston care homes dealt with the coronavirus crisis has been released, showing how the council used a community hospital to prevent the virus from spreading into them.

Speaking at this month’s Response and Recovery Committee (June 25), council leader Caroline Kerr said the discharge process from the borough’s main hospitals to free-up beds for coronavirus patients was the issue that “worried” her the most since she became council leader in the first week of lockdown.

She said: “I was really concerned to discover three days in that the government’s instruction, which was I know intended to keep the NHS safe, had the potential to endanger people in care homes. I was really concerned about that and I talked to officers about it at length.”

She explained that the borough used Teddington Memorial Hospital to discharge patients who were known to be Covid-positive, but no longer needed to be hospitalised, to ensure they did not go into a care home and spread the virus further.

“To be fair we did not know that the disease could be asymptomatic at that time, but I think there is a national inquiry that is going to examine how our care homes were made so vulnerable by a national policy that discharged people from hospitals before testing had been done. But in Kingston we never knowingly did that and we used Teddington Memorial Hospital to protect people from that.”

The report said that the council only arranged the discharge of four people  from hospital into care homes from April 1 until May 20.

Opposition leader cllr Davis said he “applauded” the use of Teddington Memorial Hospital, adding: “It’s a shame that other councils didn’t follow suit in that in some respects.”

Nevertheless, the report showed that 34 care home residents had sadly died having tested positive for coronavirus.

It noted, “one in every 1,000 Kingston residents passed away in the previous two months in excess of the normal death rate, a very sobering statistic.”

The borough was the first in London and second area in England to support the testing of care home staff, using the centre at Chessington World of Adventures as a regional testing centre.

It is now developing the local Track and Trace programme to contain any local outbreaks.

Kingston will receive £940,711 from government to develop and implement local outbreak plans.

These include making sure all residents with symptoms know how and where to get tested and supporting those who need to isolate.

The paper also notes the council ‘will support the implementation of outbreak management plans’ helping to quickly commit people and resources to shut down any local outbreaks in situations such as schools, care homes or particular locations.

These plans will be developed by June 30 and implemented immediately.