Former Scottish health secretary Jeane Freeman has told the UK Covid-19 Inquiry she will regret the care home Covid deaths for the rest of her life.

Freeman made the comments during evidence given to the UK Covid-19 Inquiry yesterday.

Half of the deaths in the first wave of the pandemic in Scotland occurred in care homes.

Freeman told the inquiry there “wasn’t sufficient urgency” shown by the UK government to tackle the pending crisis during a COBRA meeting in March 2020.

Infection control

The former health secretary said there had been “a realisation or a growing understanding that the understanding and application of basic infection prevention and control was not necessarily consistent across all residential settings”.

She regretted her presumption “that the national manual for basic infection prevention and control was widely understood and practised”, adding: “I think, again for reasons I’ve indicated and with no criticism at all of individual staff, that was not consistently the case.”

Freeman admitted the government’s understanding of the care at home sector had not been adequate at the beginning of the pandemic. She said the government had worked with Scottish Care and COSLA to identify deficiencies in how the system was operating.

The former health secretary identified “greater clinical support” in care homes as a further deficiency.

She denied Jamie Dawson KC’s suggestion that the system was “completely inadequate”, commenting: “It was not as adequate as I would have wished it to be. I believe it was all that could be done with the resources available to us at that point, and that improved as time passed.”

Testing

Freeman also denied that testing of care homes was not put in place soon enough, commenting that “you cannot magic out of thin air appropriate buildings, appropriate kit and skilled individuals”.

She added: “A lot of effort was put into increasing our capacity for testing, because even if I hadn’t understood the vulnerabilities in our care homes and other closed settings, I understood the vulnerabilities of those caring for individuals in terms, not only of PPE but of knowing whether or not they were themselves infectious and posing a risk not only to themselves, their families but also to those they cared for, and I believe that we moved as quickly as we could, actually could, to increase our testing capacity.”