Mersey Care has only had five Covid-19 deaths because it is not an acute trust

A post on Facebook with over 1,000 shares shows a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust, which says that there were only five deaths related to Covid-19 in that trust, and that those patients all had pre-existing conditions.

The post goes on to say that Mersey Care “provides services across 80 sites in the North West” and has “over 7000 staff [serving] a population of almost 11 million people!”

Mersey Care told us that it was a genuine FOI response, saying: “The figures in the FOI response relate to patients in Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust, they do not represent figures for the whole of the Liverpool or Merseyside area.”

This is no secret—we can see from publicly accessible data that the trust had had five Covid-19 deaths as of 30 November.

But the key issue here is that Mersey Care is a trust that offers adult specialist mental health, addiction, learning disability and community health services.

It does have over 7,000 staff and serves almost 11 million people, as the post claims, but offers mental health and learning disabilities care. 

This trust doesn’t provide services like its own Accident & Emergency units, respiratory wards, or intensive care units, or other services that we would expect to treat seriously ill Covid-19 patients. 

Other NHS trusts in the Merseyside area that do provide these types of service have seen many more Covid-19 deaths. For example, Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (which runs hospitals including Royal Liverpool, Aintree and Broadgreen) has recorded 928 deaths from Covid-19 as of 2 December.

We’ve written about similar claims like this before, where people have sent Freedom of Information requests to trusts that don’t provide relevant services, asking how many Covid-19 deaths they have recorded.