Covid-19 and the Care Sector
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 30 April 2020
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Have the mounting deaths exposed cracks in the way we deliver care to some of our most vulnerable people?
David Aaronovitch looks at how the system is structured and funded. and why it sometimes struggles to gain the political attention it needs.
This is a sector in which people have called for reform has for decades but very little has been delivered.
How have other countries care systems coped during the pandemic and what lessons could we learn?
Contributors:
Alison Holt, BBC Social Affairs Correspondent
William Laing, Chairman of Laing Buisson
Jill Manthorpe, Professor of Social Work at King's College London
Adelina Comas-Herrera, researcher at the London School of Economics
Natasha Curry, Acting Deputy Director of Policy, Nuffield Trust
Producers: Luke Radcliff, Sally Abrahams and Rosamund Jones Editor: Jasper Corbett
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:07.4 | Welcome to the briefing room with me, David Aronovich. The briefing room is the audio space |
| 0:12.5 | where in 28 short minutes, you and I get to understand a big issue with the help of the |
| 0:17.9 | top experts on the subject. This week, the care sector and the coronavirus, |
| 0:24.6 | what the latter has told us about the former. |
| 0:46.4 | This week, we began to get a much clearer picture of how many people are dying with coronavirus in our care homes. |
| 0:49.1 | And the story is pretty grim. |
| 0:54.8 | This week, I want to know what these statistics and others tell us about the state of social care in the UK and whether long-delayed reform to the sector has now become inevitable. |
| 1:01.6 | Step inside the briefing room and together we'll find out. |
| 1:16.0 | Let's start with the figures about deaths in social care that came out this week. |
| 1:19.6 | Alison Holt is the BBC's social affairs correspondent. |
| 1:23.4 | Alison, my first question is, what do we mean by care home? |
| 1:24.2 | What does it cover? |
| 1:29.3 | What we're talking about here are residential homes for people who are older and disabled, |
| 1:31.8 | who have a reasonable level of need. |
| 1:33.5 | And we're talking about nursing homes. |
| 1:40.5 | So there they will have a much higher level of need for support with that medical input from a nurse. |
| 1:41.5 | Okay. |
| 1:47.9 | So let's look at the somber statistics for a moment. What do we know currently about the number of people who have died from coronavirus in care homes? Well, probably the best |
| 1:55.1 | statistics to look at are those from the Office for National Statistics and they published their |
| 2:00.2 | latest set of figures on Tuesday. |
| 2:02.9 | They showed a third of all coronavirus deaths in England and Wales |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.