It was not clear to all nursing homes that there was an exception to the visiting ban in the first corona wave if a resident was dying. Bianca Buurman said this on Friday afternoon during her interrogation by the corona committee. At the time, Buurman was an independent advisor for the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport. In that role she provided “solicited and unsolicited” advice on matters affecting nurses and caregivers. Later in the pandemic, she became president of the professional association, called V&VN. She is also professor of Acute Elderly Care at Amsterdam UMC.
In March 2020, the government decided to impose a ban on visits to nursing homes, to protect vulnerable people as much as possible from exposure to the coronavirus. During a press conference, then Minister of Health Hugo de Jonge (CDA) said that an exception could be made if a nursing home resident was dying. Yet many residents died alone, Buurman told the inquiry committee. “It should have been communicated better, for example via the trade association.”
The fact that people died alone, Buurman said, “has left a huge scratch on the soul”, both of relatives and staff. “As a caregiver you build a bond with residents.” For them it was profound to see how old, vulnerable people died without their families around them.
According to Buurman, there was too little attention for healthcare staff at the beginning of the pandemic. “There was a motion in the House of Representatives [PvdA-Kamerlid Lodewijk] Asscher and [PVV-Kamerlid Geert] Wilders who spoke about three thousand ICU beds. Then I thought: how could this have been invented? For me it was wishful thinking. If you wanted to realize that in practice, it meant that we needed three times as many beds and we didn’t have the nurses for that at all.”
Nurses’ perspectives are important
The interests of nurses were also not represented in the Outbreak Management Team (OMT), the influential advisory body for the corona crisis. Neighbor would like to see this differently in a future pandemic. “That perspective is very important. You have to know how things work in practice. Sometimes certain advice does not work in a specific context, such as keeping a distance of one and a half meters in elderly care.” VWS had nominated Buurman as an OMT member, but to no avail. “VWS did not determine who was in it, the OMT itself determined that.”
Later in the pandemic, according to Buurman, more attention was paid to the interests of nurses and caregivers. She noticed a lot of interest from the House of Representatives, which, for example, asked her to participate in a hearing in which MPs were informed by experts.
In 2021, Buurman became chairman of the largest professional association for nurses and caregivers. In that capacity, she often sat around the table with then Minister for Medical Care Tamara van Ark (VVD) and later with Hugo de Jonge. She found Van Ark “nice and accessible” and De Jonge “more headstrong”. “He followed his own path more, but a minister is allowed to do that.”
In the third corona wave in the autumn of 2021, Buurman, together with other parties, sent an urgent letter to De Jonge and then Prime Minister Mark Rutte (VVD). The letter called for more measures to combat corona infections. The letter writers were concerned about the new corona variant in combination with the high absenteeism due to illness among healthcare workers. They have also expressed their concerns in “several consultations”. “Not enough was done for us. I think this had to do with the fact that the social support for the measures was becoming more limited.”
Live blog
Parliamentary inquiry corona
Microbiologist Amrish Baidjoe, critical member of the Red Team: ‘The sense of urgency was missing in the second wave’