Care homes were offered additional payments to take Covid positive patients from hospital at the height of the pandemic an investigation has revealed.

Research by The Telegraph revealed Birmingham City Council paid care homes £1,000 per patient to take hospital discharges, including those with Covid, while Durham County Council also made an initial offer of payment on this basis.

A Birmingham City Council spokesperson said: “When the pandemic hit there was obvious pressure on all parts of the health and social care system. We took urgent action to support both the NHS in creating as much capacity as possible in acute hospitals and local care settings that were under immense pressure and struggling to access PPE.

“The city council worked to government guidance at all times and in the majority of cases discharged citizens into short-term beds under the national Hospital Discharge Service Requirements, to reduce the spread of Covid in care homes.

“Not only was there national pressure and associated funding from government to provide a financial support package, care providers were struggling with a range of increasing costs. Without support, many providers would have been unable to continue to support both existing service users or new demands that were anticipated.

“The £1,000 was to support all hospital discharges, helping providers to purchase additional PPE, pay additional staff and conduct additional cleansing to allow the prompt discharge of residents into care homes and to support appropriate isolation and infection control measures.”

Around 25,000 patients were discharged into care homes in the UK without testing between 17 March and 15 April 2020. A Hight Court ruling in April 2022 found the care home discharge policy unlawful.

There were 43,256 deaths involving Covid-19 in care homes in England between March 2020 and January 2022.

Commenting in November 2021, Jane Robinson, Durham County Council’s corporate director for adult and health services, said: “In March 2020 the government asked hospitals to immediately discharge patients to care homes.

“In response to this, we, like many other local authorities, followed expert advice from our national industry bodies and offered to distribute additional funding from the government to cover some of the increased costs of accepting hospital discharges for those care homes that had the capability and capacity to accept them.

“Ultimately no payments were made on this basis as, once guidance was provided by the government, we adapted our approach and all care homes received this additional funding.”

Professor Martin Green, chief executive of Care England, told us: “Many care homes were able to effectively support people who had Covid-19 and it is completely appropriate that the local authority should have paid them extra because there are significant extra expenses associated with barrier nursing people who have infectious conditions.”