A woman was forced to stand outside and watch through patio doors as care home staff comforted her mother in her last moments, an inquiry heard.
Gillian Duncan’s parents were residents in Edinburgh’s Northcare Manor at the beginning of the pandemic, she told the Scottish Covid-19 Inquiry yesterday.
Despite lockdown, both of them, who were suffering from Alzheimer’s, had contracted the deadly bug and Mrs Duncan’s mother became seriously ill.
Mrs Duncan was told that her mother ‘could not go to hospital’, according to what the home said were instructions from Public Health Scotland.
Instead, she told junior counsel Faryma Bahrami, her mother’s symptoms were treated with ‘paracetamol and then it was end of life medication’.
Grieving Gillian Duncan at the Scottish Covid-19 Inquiry
Edinburgh’s Northcare Manor care home
The Edinburgh-based inquiry heard Mrs Duncan called the care home on April 28, 2020, when a nurse said the elderly woman was ‘very close to passing away’.
She rushed to the care home and was told she could not go inside but could look through the patio doors into her mother’s room.
Mrs Duncan wrote notes in her car, and told the inquiry: ‘I thought maybe mum would be able to see me through the glass, so I was in the car writing “I love you, me and my sister are both here, we are here with you”.
I was thinking I’d hold them up to the glass.
‘Of course when I got there I realised that my mum had her eyes closed and she was very close to passing away.
‘The nurse and the carers were with my mum and they opened the door.
I had full PPE on. I had a pinny on, gloves and a mask, but I was outside, two metres away.
‘The nurse and the carers were holding her hands, they were stroking her hair.’
Holding back tears, she said: ‘I understood I couldn’t be near her.
I wasn’t going to break the rules.
‘It was hard but I was there and I was speaking.
The carers and the nurse were very kind and knew my mum so I felt she was being cared for in that moment.
‘I was trying to be calm, trying to say calm things, but I don’t think I was. I think I was crying out her name and calling her “mummy”. I’ve never called her that since I was tiny.’
Mrs Duncan’s father lay in the room next door, unaware his wife of 62 years had died.
Mrs Duncan said carers had angled the bed so she could see her mother’s final moments.
But Mrs Duncan’s sister was not able to be there in time.
Mrs Duncan said: ‘When my mum passed away, she missed it by minutes.
I just remember her coming into the care home garden, sort of running in, and I just shook my head, and I just remember her almost collapsing.’
They sobbed in the garden, unable to hug each other because of the rules, and were only able to see their father through the glass in the neighbouring room.
The cause of death was recorded as Covid and Alzheimer’s, and Mrs Duncan’s father died on Christmas Day that year from Alzheimer’s.
Mrs Duncan said despite society opening up, her father was never allowed out again and her anger was ‘off the scale’.
She said: ‘I believe care home residents received the worst of both worlds.
They weren’t protected in the early days of the virus and then were pretty much imprisoned once the Scottish Government realised their mistakes and the number of deaths their decisions had caused.’
The inquiry continues.