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Sweden’s Prime Minister has admitted the country has not done enough to protect the elderly
More than half of elderly Covid-19 victims in Sweden have died in care homes. Some healthcare workers believe an institutional reluctance to admit patients to hospital is costing lives.
Lili Perspolisi’s father, Reza Sedghi, was not seen by a doctor on the day he died from coronavirus, at his care home in northern Stockholm.
A nurse told her he’d had a morphine shot in the hours before he passed away, but he was not given oxygen, nor did staff call an ambulance. “No-one was there and he died alone,” says Ms Perspolisi. “It’s so unfair.”
Most of the 3,698 people who have died from coronavirus in Sweden so far were over 70, despite the fact that the country said shielding risk groups was its top priority.
Sweden, with 10m inhabitants, has kept more of society open than is the case in most of Europe.
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Media caption‘No one was there when my father died’
“We did not manage to protect the most vulnerable people, the most elderly, despite our best intentions,” Prime Minister Stefan Löfven admitted last week.
Sweden did ban visits to care homes on 31 March. But as in many European countries, relatives, staff and union officials have shared concerns that protective clothing arrived too late, and that some staff may have gone to work at the start of the crisis despite showing symptoms of Covid-19.
Now, increasing numbers of workers are also coming forward to criticise regional healthcare authorities for protocols which they say discourage care home workers from sending residents into hospital, and prevent care home and nursing staff from administering oxygen without a doctor’s approval, either as part of acute or palliative (end-of-life) services.
‘We were told not to send them in’
“They told us that we shouldn’t send anyone to the hospital, even if they may be 65 and have many years to live. We were told not to send them in,” says Latifa Löfvenberg, a nurse who worked in several care homes around Gävle, north of Stockholm, at the beginning of the pandemic.
“Some can have a lot of years left to live with loved ones, but they don’t have the chance… because they never make it to the hospital,” she says. “They suffocate to death. And it’s a lot of panic and it’s very hard to just stand by and watch.”
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Latifa Löfvenberg works as a nurse in Stockholm
Ms Löfvenberg is now working on a Covid-19 ward in a major hospital in the Swedish capital, where she says the demographic of patients she’s treating is further evidence that the elderly are being kept away. “We don’t have many older people. It’s a lot of younger people born in the 90s, 80s, 70s.”
A paramedic working in Stockholm, who wanted to remain anonymous, told the BBC she had not had a single call-out to an elderly care home connected to Covid-19, despite putting in overtime during the crisis.
Mikael Fjällid, a Swedish private consultant in anaesthetics and intensive care, says he believes “a lot of lives” could have been saved if more patients had been able to access hospital treatment, or if care home workers were given increased responsibilities to administer oxygen themselves, instead of waiting for specialist Covid-19 response teams or paramedics.
“If you need care and you can benefit [from] care, for example, or oxygen for a short time, you should have it. Like any other age group in the population,” he says.
“If you have more than 20% that survive without nothing, you could assume that also perhaps the same amount or the same proportion would have survived with supplemental