Care homes that have been given PPE to protect residents and staff will be asked to pay the government back, the Health Secretary has said.

Jeane Freeman has told MSPs that, while the main focus is getting supplies of protective kit to the frontline, a discussion about “reimbursement of costs” would follow.

In response, the organisation representing care providers across Scotland says existing arrangements might not be appropriate for times that are ‘not ordinary’.

As usual supply chains failed due to the crisis, the Scottish Government set up a direct route run by the NHS to distribute stocks to the social care sector.

Some care providers have seen costs for PPE rocket by 2,500% while others had their usual deliveries diverted to the health service.

Asked by Lewis Macdonald, the convener of Holyrood’s health committee, whether care homes were paying the Scottish Government for the PPE it was providing, Ms Freeman said: “They are not, at this point. I am sure that they will when we have a discussion with them about the overall cost.”

The health secretary said residential care services would be saving money because they were getting PPE for free.

Ms Freeman told the committee it was originally estimated that the government would supply 20% of care home PPE supplies but this proportion had risen above that level.

“We will do the tally up later,” she told MSPs. “We will begin our discussion—through Scottish Care, I expect—about reimbursement of costs.”

Scottish Care CEO Dr Donald Macaskill says any reckoning of the costs has to take account of the special circumstances the virus had created.

“It is the responsibility in ‘ordinary’ times for providers to source their own PPE,” he told healthandcare.scot.

“Whilst providers continue to do this and have done so since the beginning of the pandemic, we are not in ordinary times.”

“Any payments or reimbursements agreed from those negotiations will require to be fair and equitable, not least given the reality that the lack of supplies for social care is in part a result of the actions of central UK Government.”

Nearly six in ten deaths in Scotland linked to covid-19 have taken place in care homes, according to the most recent statistics.

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