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Woman whose elderly father died at a nursing home in England has won first leg of lawsuit against UK government for alleged breaches of protection of nursing home residents during coronavirus pandemic
The government and health authorities had asked the High Court to dismiss the case, but Judge Thomas Linden granted Cathy Gardner leave to hold a full hearing of her legal challenge. The judge said he considered it “in the interests of justice that the claim be heard”.
Gardner’s father, Michael Gibson, died at the Oxfordshire County Nursing Home in April. The cause of his death was recorded as “probably COVID”.
Gardner argued his father was one of some 20,000 nursing home residents in Britain who lost their lives to the coronavirus in the spring and that many deaths could have been avoided had the government acted differently.
“Rather than protecting them, the government made their retirement homes a death trap,” she wrote on a website where she was seeking crowdfunding for her trial.
Gardner’s lawyer Jason Coppel said the UK government’s lack of timely and adequate measures to protect vulnerable nursing home residents was “one of the most egregious and devastating policy failures of recent times”. He argued that the decision to send patients from the hospital to care homes without testing or quarantine arrangements allowed the virus to spread.
Lawyers for government and health officials have argued that hospital discharges are not a key cause or driver of coronavirus infections in nursing homes.
Gardner said she expected a trial to take place next spring.
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Follow AP’s coronavirus coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak
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