THE Scottish Government’s drive to move elderly hospital patients into care homes at the start of the Covid pandemic caused harm, the national clinical director has admitted.

Professor Jason Leitch said the decision had been taken to protect vulnerable people against an expected wave of infections arriving in hospitals.

However he acknowledged: “In hindsight that did cause some harm.”

At the start of the outbreak, there was also pressure to move “delayed discharge” patients - those medically fit to leave - out of hospital to free up bed space for Covid cases.

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More than half the elderly patients relocated to around 200 care homes were not tested for the virus, leading to claims they helped seed the infection among residents.

More than a third of the 12,600 Covid deaths recorded on death certificates in Scotland in 2020 and 2021 related to care homes.

Professor Leitch said the impact of the care home transfers would remain with him "for the rest of my life”.

He said it was done to “protect people who were in hospital, because we knew Covid was coming to the hospitals” but was nevertheless “a very, very difficult thing”.

He said: “In hindsight that did cause some harm.”

Prof Leitch added: “The reality is we will never know what would have happened if we had left them in hospital where Covid was arriving.

“But all of those nuanced choices, that, the schools closure, the closing of places of worship across the country, these were enormously difficult pieces of advice and the people who made the decisions, I think it will stay with them, with me, forever.

“But no more than it will with the families who lost individuals, who are living with long Covid, who are living with the consequences of lost businesses or kids who were not educated for months. That is what the pandemic has done to us and every country in the world.”

The decisions of Scottish ministers and their advisers are to be examined by a forthcoming public inquiry chaired by the judge Lord Brailsford.

Prof Leitch also said schools might not have to close if Scotland entered another lockdown.

The harm caused by the loss of learning meant “different choices” might be made, he said.

He told BBC Radio Scotland that in 2020 the “genuine scientific evidence was at that point you will never get a vaccine”, forcing the government into “an old-fashioned approach”.

He said: “That was the only thing we had. No drugs, no vaccine, no other way.

“So if you go back to the smallpox outbreaks, or the Spanish flu outbreaks, the most traditional thing you can do in a public health sense is isolate those with the infection.

“So we had to use a very old-fashioned approach, that’s what it was. 

“Lockdown was not something that anybody relished – you, me, the politicians, nobody wanted to do that.”

He recalled giving that “horrible advice” to ministers, but said that now the “game has completely changed”.

Scientific developments since lockdown meant “we’ve got good treatment, we’ve got very good vaccination” he said, praising the “remarkable science” behind them.

Asked if he still believed entering lockdown was the right thing to do, he said: “I do. There was no easy path. It wasn’t like there was a good road and a bad road, they were just all bad. For everybody who said you shouldn’t have locked us down there was another set of people who said you didn’t lock us down for long enough.

“Finding that path down the middle for the politicians of the world … was really, really tricky.”

In Scotland he said that “what I think we did was get the main calls right”.

But Prof Leitch added: “That doesn’t mean if there were another one, if there were a new virus, if there were a new version of this virus, you wouldn’t change, because you now have more knowledge than you had.”

Asked specifically if schools would still have to close – as they did in both March of 2020 and again in early 2021 – he said that “different choices” might be made.

Prof Leitch said that was “depending on the virus, depending on the harm the virus causes, and the evidence you now have of what school closure does, both to teachers … but also to the education of our kids. Then you might make different choices as a politician and you might give different advice as an adviser.”