More than 43,000 people died with Covid-19 in care homes between March 2020 and July 2022. Across Oxfordshire, care home teams, domiciliary care providers and supported living services, and non-CQC registered services, lived through those months on the frontline, supporting some of our county's most vulnerable people while coping with unprecedented uncertainty and loss. Everyone who worked through that period carries memories of it, myself included.

The Inquiry has put on record what providers and families have known all along: there was no protective ring around social care in those critical early weeks of March and April 2020. While national efforts were understandably focused on protecting hospitals, care services were often left waiting for guidance, testing, PPE and support. The Inquiry rightly traces this to the absence of meaningful pandemic planning for social care.

We welcome Recommendation 8, proposing a voluntary register for England, which the CAA argued for only five days ago in Towards a National Workforce Settlement. However, it must be more than a list of names. Social care deserves a professional registration system that recognises skills, competence and responsibility. A phased approach, beginning with registered managers, advanced practitioners and delegated healthcare specialists, would help create a clear professional framework. A register tells you who works in care. Professional registration tells you what they are trained and trusted to do, and allows those skills to be recognised wherever they work. Nations across the UK already register care workers. England should now catch up.

For many Oxfordshire families, the most painful aspect of the pandemic was being separated from loved ones living in care settings. Yet it is important to remember that providers were operating within national guidance that frequently changed and often made visiting the exception rather than the norm. Care homes are sometimes portrayed as having chosen those restrictions when, in reality, they were navigating difficult and rapidly evolving rules intended to protect lives. Some services undoubtedly took a more cautious approach than necessary, but many others went to extraordinary lengths to maintain family connections through garden visits, window visits, video calls and carefully managed face-to-face contact whenever possible.

The real measure of success will not be how thoroughly these lessons are recorded, but whether these eight recommendations are acted upon before the next pandemic. Oxfordshire's care providers, care workers, residents and families deserve the confidence that social care will never again be an afterthought in national emergency planning.



Eddy McDowall, Chief Executive, OACP