HEALTH Secretary Jeane Freeman and the SNP are facing heavy criticism after admitting that returning patients from hospitals to care homes during the early days of the pandemic was a “mistake.”

Ms Freeman, who will retire in May, said the Scottish government had failed in “understanding the social care sector well enough” and “didn’t take the right precautions” when older people were leaving hospitals.

The former nurse made the comments in an interview on the BBC Politically Thinking podcast on Thursday night, the day that Scotland’s coronavirus death toll passed 10,000.

Ms Freeman told host Nick Robinson that the government did not understand the care sector “well enough and didn’t respond to what was needed in care homes.”  

She said: “We wanted people who didn’t need to stay in hospital any longer — because they’d been treated and were clinically well — to be discharged as quickly as possible so we freed up those beds for Covid patients.

“But we didn’t take the right precautions to make sure that older people leaving hospital, going into care homes, were as safe as they could be, and that was a mistake.

“I might argue we couldn’t do anything other than we did and all of the rest of it, but it still created a real problem for those older people and for others who lived in care homes — and staff who worked in care homes.”

SNP ministers have failed to apologise and take responsibility in Parliament for the Scottish government’s instructions to hospitals to discharge older people throughout the pandemic. 

Former Labour MSP Neil Findlay called the admission a “disgrace,” reiterating that the issue had been raised at Holyrood for “months.”

Scottish Labour health spokeswoman Jackie Baillie added: “These admissions will offer no comfort to the families of those who needlessly lost loved ones due to the Scottish government’s errors.

“The time for reflection was when it could have saved lives, not now on podcasts.”

An SNP spokesman said the government had acknowledged that mistakes were made. 

He added: “The First Minister has committed to establishing a public inquiry into the handling of Covid, in which the voices of families would be heard, by the end of the year and we hope other governments across the UK will come together to support such an inquiry on a four-nations basis.”