Louise Gilmour: After Covid, have we learned to value our care home workers?

A care home resident holding hands with her daughter.

The headlines come at us fast these days as news alerts, each one more outlandish than the last, ping into our phones.

Sometimes, we even get two for one, like the fifth anniversary of Covid-19 arriving just as Nicola Sturgeon announced her decision to stand down as an MSP earlier this month.

Pondering the significance, many pundits agreed the former first minister’s leadership during the pandemic was possibly the high watermark of her Holyrood career.

Certainly, compared to her counterpart down south, Sturgeon seemed impressive, but next to Boris Johnson the Chuckle Brothers would have looked Churchillian. The airy but persistent notion that we somehow responded better to Covid than other countries – cough, England – is something else again though and entirely for the birds.

The Scottish Government might have rung a few changes – remember FACTS? Anyone? – but was, in every way that mattered, in lockstep with Westminster. Of course, ministers were calculating unimaginable risks and shouldering unprecedented responsibilities but, that said, the legacy of Covid – for our young people, for our economy – is vast, still unfolding and possibly permanent, and needs assessed with the clear eyes of hindsight.

Other policies were available and so were experts voicing concern about the scale and speed of UK lockdowns in real time without the benefit of a rear-view mirror.

Sweden, famously, did things differently. Comparative statistics can be made to dance and sing but schools and workplaces stayed open there and excess deaths were no higher than here. Meanwhile, after establishing a national commission in 2020 to review the country’s response, a final report was published two years later.

Perhaps, if we’re lucky, our Covid inquiries might be concluded in another five years but only a fool would bet on it or expect accountability or change. The repeated promise that lessons will be learned is as hollow as the self-congratulatory hubris suggesting Scotland did things better.

We did not get everything wrong but mistakes were made and one, above all, retains the power to shock.

Revealed by this paper, the decision to ship Covid patients out of hospitals and into care homes where unwitting staff were wearing bin bags for want of personal protection equipment was, as one owner claimed, “like putting a match to tinder”.

It was only the most dismaying example of how our care homes, staff and residents were thrown to the wolves.

The commitment and care offered by staff in those homes would eventually prompt promises that, after Covid was over, they would be properly recognised and fairly rewarded. If only all those warm words paid a single bill.

Last year, unions urged the return of £38 million of funding ringfenced for social care but secretly cut from Scottish Government budgets while progress towards the promised £15-an-hour minimum wage makes glaciers look a little hasty.

These committed workers were abandoned five years ago and have been betrayed ever since. After all the big but empty talk of a new National Care Service, they continue to endure low pay, no sick pay and little security. It is an abject disgrace.

In lockdown, we clapped and banged our pots to salute the NHS and care workers. It is lamentable that, on Thursday morning at Holyrood, our members in private social care will bang the pots again, forced to demonstrate to get the attention of politicians who have spent five years turning the other way.

Frontline but low-paid workers, social care staff included, kept this country on its feet during Covid and deserve respect and recognition, not mumbled thanks and more excuses.

If we have learned anything from Covid, we should have learned that.

Louise Gilmour is GMB Scotland secretary