Phillip Schofield furiously confronted care minister Helen Whately MP, after a nurse was arrested for taking her 97-year-old mother out of a care home.
Ylenia Angeli was filmed being put in handcuffs and placed in the back of a car after the nursing home looking after her mum, who has dementia, called the police on her.
Appearing on This Morning alongside granddaughter, actress Leandra Ashton, Ylenia explained that she had pushed herself into the care home during a ‘window visit’, hugging and kissing her mum for the first time in nine months.
She later got her in the car and refused to take her back, saying that she was too heartbroken to see her mother suffering any longer by herself.
Speaking about the incident, Ylenia said that she now fears her mum could be in an even worse situation, and told Holly and Phillip: ‘I do believe that because we had mum in the car, that they will now be isolating her, so I can quite see that they will say that she’s a Covid risk, or something, and so she will be even more isolated.
‘She’ll be left in her bedroom, in her bed, I would imagine, for the whole period of quarantine, which is going to be so detrimental for her.’
MP Whately was then brought on to the show, with Phillip grilling her about why these rulings are still in place, seven months since the first lockdown, and as we head into the second one.
‘Where’s the compassion here, for a 97 year old lady who is in her final years?,’ he asked her.
‘The family wants to hug her, they want to be with her, damn the consequences. They want her, she needs them.
‘You look cold. You look heartless. This is affecting people’s mental health, there has to be a way around this.’
Whately, who had previously refused to comment on the family’s situation and her own feelings on the arrest, then replied: ‘Genuinely I’m not, I’ve sat in tears, listening to the stories and talking to people about how they haven’t been able to see those that love.
‘I genuinely find it heartbreaking and genuinely have spent huge amounts of time, and working with care providers to work out how we can make this better, but we are in the context, we’ve got parts of the country where one in 14 people are estimated to have Covid.
‘So even if you have a care home in an area like that, with say 40 people living in it and 40 people coming in to visit them, the likelihood is one of those 40 people will be Covid positive but might not even know it, because they know that this is a disease which you can have no symptoms.’
‘If somebody does take COVID into a care home, we know we have PPE, we know your social distancing, we know we have these measures, but if somebody does take it in, it is still incredibly hard to stop that passing,’ she added.
However, Whately then said that it will be at least another month before new protocols around care homes are rolled out, with testing on the procedures only just taking place.
‘You’ve had a bit of time to sort that out, I’ve got to say,’ Phillip then responded. ‘If you’re rolling that out in a month.
‘There’s been quite a bit of time to get that together, we’ve been doing this for a very long time.’
This Morning airs weekdays at 10am on ITV.
