Coronavirus: Executive Approach to Decision-making

Part of Ministerial Statement – in the Northern Ireland Assembly at 12:00 pm on 12 May 2020.

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Photo of Michelle O'Neill Michelle O'Neill Sinn Féin 12:00, 12 May 2020

Sorry, I thought that you had the statement an hour beforehand, so apologies for that. Our door is open to discuss this further outside the Chamber today with you, as Chair of the Committee.

We all know that care homes are where all the attention needs to be right now. The Health Minister described care homes as where the battle currently is, which means that there can be no stone unturned. We need to throw everything but the kitchen sink at making sure that every resource that is necessary in care homes is put in place. We discussed that yesterday at the Executive and agreed to come back with a fuller paper on those types of measures and what additionality we can bring to put the effort into the care homes. There has been a lot of emphasis on improvements in support for care homes, and the Member registered that point himself. Financial support and trying to transfer staff in are crucial, but we have to keep asking ourselves every day: are we doing enough? Is enough being done?

For me, one of the things that will be really crucial to us being able to advance and support care homes more is to get to the point of universal testing. I have made that point. When there is an outbreak in a care home, there should be a rolling programme of testing that allows you to monitor that situation very carefully. We do not want to be sitting, at any stage of this, regretting that we did not do enough, so the test, trace and isolate policy is crucial to all that, as you know. We have to get to the point where there is capacity to test in care homes in a universal way, and we are having that conversation. At the Executive on Thursday, we expect to have a further conversation about how we can build on the additional finances and the resource in terms of people. We need proper personal protective equipment (PPE) for all staff in care homes, and all these things need to be looked at in the round. As the document outlines, there will be an urgent expansion leading to an intensive programme of testing for residents and staff in care homes, and that will commence immediately. That is a good thing.

What about the light at the end of the tunnel? I get that. We all have families and we are all in the same boat, and everybody wants to have something to look forward to. We looked very carefully, as a whole Executive, at the issue of putting timelines and specific dates to certain areas, and we decided against that for the reason that people want light at the end of the tunnel. We do not want to build up expectation and then have to move, because all this is dependent on the R rate being at a lower level. Clearly, at the moment, with the R rate sitting at somewhere around 0·8 or 0·9, we are not in a space where we can comfortably move to do anything.

To give people an idea and indication of time, we said that we will review the regulations every three weeks. The next review has to happen by 28 May. However, we have built enough flexibility into this programme so that, if the Chief Medical Officer and Chief Scientific Officer were to sit down tomorrow with the Executive and say, "We are now at 0·5 in the reproductive rate", that will allow us the space to move in advance of the three weeks. The document talks about the different stages and the five-stage approach, and you could very quickly be at step one. That gives people an indication that, provided that the disease keeps going on a downward trajectory and the R rate keeps coming down, we could be in that space in the very immediate future. Hopefully that gives people an indication of time. The flexibility that we built into this gives us the ability to move as we see fit. Hopefully that gives people an understanding of that. It is about trying not to build up expectation. It is about saying, "Here are the five steps. Here is the guide. Here are the types of things that are included in that". It is important that we highlight to people things that can perhaps happen in each step in the time frame.