Ruthie Henshall: ‘I wasn’t allowed to see my mum for a year during Covid. She died of loneliness’

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Actor Ruthie Henshall will never forget the image of her 87-year-old mother crying behind the window of a care home, not understanding why her children weren’t coming inside to visit her. For almost a year during the Covid-19 pandemic, Henshall and her sisters weren’t able to see their mother in person, due to government restrictions on care homes.

It was only in the final weeks of her mother Gloria’s life that Henshall was able to regularly visit her after securing official status as her mother’s essential caregiver – something only one family member could do, meaning her sisters didn’t see their mother in person until the day of her death.

“Anger does not fully describe how I feel,” says Henshall today, over five years on from the death of her mother, who suffered from dementia. “My mother was an absolute firecracker. But over four and a half months when we couldn’t visit her, she went from walking and talking and feeding herself to not being able to do any of that. She just became a shadow.

“Watching that through a care home window is one of the most painful things ever. We lost precious time with her. People are still traumatised by this, by losing time with their loved ones and watching them die of loneliness. The government calling [their measures] a ‘protective ring’ for care homes is an absolute farce.”

Today, the latest instalment of the Covid-19 Inquiry report has labelled that very claim from former health secretary Matt Hancock “unfounded”, stating “care homes received insufficient protection at the time they most needed it.”

The report found the care sector was treated as “an afterthought” during the pandemic, with 43,000 deaths involving the virus taking place in care homes. It also stated that preventing visits to care homes “caused incalculable harm to residents and their loved ones and often resulted in a significant decline in the health and wellbeing of residents, especially those with complex cognitive conditions such as dementia”.

“Many of those people were dying of loneliness,” says Henshall, who is now an ambassador for Rights for Residents, a campaign group fighting for the human rights of care home residents and their families. “A lot of people have talked about experiencing PTSD from all of this. Nobody is being held responsible – and they should be.”

The government restrictions at the time meant care homes stopped visitors from seeing their loved ones, other than through windows – Henshall remembers theirs was only open a tiny bit, so they had to shout through it – or behind plastic screens.

“It was a postcode lottery as to whether the manager would let you,” she adds. Relatives and other carers weren’t allowed in, and for residents like Gloria, the care they received was stripped down to functional basics.

Henshall accepts that protection was necessary, but cannot forgive a government that left care home residents exposed to the virus while banning family visits – even when relatives were vaccinated, tested and equipped with PPE. The injustice was compounded by ministers denying families precious moments with dying loved ones while flouting the rules themselves, from lockdown drinks parties to Matt Hancock’s affair.

[My mum] went from walking and talking and feeding herself to not being able to do any of that. She just became a shadow.

“F*** you,” she says, directed at those in power at the time, still angry. “[Boris Johnson and Hancock] behaved appallingly and didn’t know what you were doing but pretended you did.” The worst part, she believes, is that nothing has changed. “If there’s a pandemic again, the current provisions are not fit for purpose. This can never be allowed to happen again. It’s a basic human right to have family life.”

She was only able to visit her mother regularly as an “essential caregiver” – but even then she had to campaign and bang on the doors to be let in. “When I finally got in and I held my mum, she moaned with the joy of being touched again and held. It was so heart-wrenching to see how she just nuzzled into me and wouldn’t let go. We need human touch.”

Jean Adamson is similarly angry. Her father Aldrick, a Windrush pioneer who came to the UK in 1956 from Barbados and worked for London Underground, died alone in April 2020 after contracting Covid in a care home.

“When he became ill, we could only see him through his care home window,” she says. “I was not even able to hold his hand. He died on 15 April 2020. Like so many thousands, he died alone, isolated – a victim of Covid, but also of government negligence. That is the consequence of a social care system treated as a second-class service – too difficult for politicians to reform, too easy to ignore. Our family members paid the price. That is why social care reform cannot wait.”

She is now campaigning alongside Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK for a National Care Service to ensure people receiving care have the same protection and priority as people in hospital. Similarly, Henshall believes care should not be in the private sector.

“It’s appalling what we do to our old people, some of whom have fought for us,” she says. “Just when they need us the most, we put them somewhere where everything that they worked for is gone, and they’ve got nothing to leave their children. I find that shocking and unforgivable.”

She is also calling for Gloria’s Law – a law that would ensure anyone in a care home or hospital has the right to at least one person of their choice being with them in all circumstances.

“Everybody should have had that,” she says, looking back at the pandemic. “People in hospitals were dying on their own without one person to hold their hand, while all the workers were coming and going. So what difference would it have made for one person to hold their hand?”

She was luckily able to be at her mother’s side for the last few weeks of her life, visiting almost daily. And as her mum’s room had a separate entrance, the manager of the care home allowed Henshall’s sisters to be there as she died.

“My mother had us all there and I was about to lie with her and play her music,” she says. “It was the first time my sisters touched her apart from behind a plastic screen”. It was particularly painful for the sisters given that their father, who had died a year earlier, had specified in his will how much it meant to him for them to keep on visiting their mother.

“But that’s how important it was to him. And then we didn’t see her for nigh on a year,” says Henshaw. “We all still bear some sort of guilt that we couldn’t be there with her.”

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