One of the doctors leading Ireland’s response to COVID-19 has said the outbreak has exposed a range of issues with Ireland’s nursing home sector.

There are now at least 155 coronavirus clusters in homes around the country and almost half of the deaths recorded have been among patients in the sector.

Meanwhile, staff at a County Laois nursing home are to be offered additional supports after nine residents died over the Easter weekend.

Eight of the residents who died at the Maryborough Centre for Psychiatry of Old Age had tested positive for COVID-19.

File photo of a visitor to a nursing home holds hands with a resident. Image: Tom Weller/dpa

On The Pat Kenny Show this morning, Dr Cillian De Gascun, Director of the National Virus Reference Laboratory, said the outbreak “has highlighted issues people were not aware of” with the sector.

“I think the scale of the infection numbers in the nursing home setting was probably not something that was envisaged very early on,” he said.

“It was not something that we had seen from the early stages of the pandemic in other countries but it is certainly a priority now for the department and for the HSE.

Issues

He said there is no single issue that applies to every nursing home in the country.

“Some of them have challenges in staffing numbers, some of them are not using permanent staff; there are staff working between different centres and there are challenges in relation to PPE,” he said.

“A huge amount of work has started over the last two or more weeks to identify what individual challenges each nursing home has and how best the HSE [can help.]”

He said yesterday’s agreement allowing HSE nurses to be redeployed to nursing homes will help; however, he warned that it is more difficult to contain the virus in a residential setting than in a hospital.

“Nursing homes are not as straight forward as hospitals because you are trying to get that balance between people living in what is their home while also having significant care needs,” he said.

“It is not as easy to divide into different wards or zones and prevent cross-contamination.”

Testing

He said the COVID-19 testing backlog has largely been cleared and insisted the capacity will be in place to allow for the lifting of restrictions after May 5th.

“Obviously, we are aware of the challenges we faced on the testing front which hopefully we have come through now and we are in a position to scale up testing in the coming weeks,” he said.

“It is a brand-new system that has been established over a short number of weeks.

“Obviously there have been challenges from the point of view of supply chains and getting to the capacity that we need but a huge amount of work has gone on to try and make sure that we have a variety of different platforms now that we will not be pulling from the same supply chain.

“The capacity for testing will be there in the coming weeks to hopefully allow us to start to lift some restrictions after May 5th.”