A conscience at work: the pressure to discharge and its consequences

In the UK and other countries, hospitals became overwhelmed with Covid-19 patients who needed bed space. This led to a pressure to discharge patients as fast as possible. However, often these people were frail and vulnerable, and had not been tested for the virus. Workers feared that when managing discharges they might be contributing to harm to these patients, or their families, or the residents of the care homes to which they discharged.

In the UK, this became a major controversy as the rate of Covid-19 deaths in care homes grew and grew. Many more people died in care homes than in hospital. Later in the week we look at some underlying explanations for this – the idea that hospital care was more valued in everyone’s minds than residential care, creating a split between ‘heroic’ and ‘stocial’ forms of care.