NHS staff are being deployed into care homes in Northern Ireland to try and slow rising death tolls, in a move care bosses want urgently repeated across the UK as the Department for Health and Social Care said it believes the official death toll in care homes in England has doubled in just five days. The Department of Health in Belfast said significant numbers of staff who usually work for NHS trusts or through agencies were working in care homes across the province, where almost 300 Covid-19 cases have been confirmed by the Public Health Agency. The National Care Forum, which represents charitable care homes, said the same tactic is needed in England, where many homes are being swamped by coronavirus cases while dealing with 10% to 20% staff absence rates due to sickness or self-isolation. On Wednesday, the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) said it believed the official death toll in care homes in England had doubled in just five days, rising to about 2,100 fatalities by 15 April since the epidemic began. Care home chains have said that up to 70% of their units have reported infections. On Tuesday, the Office for National Statistics had said there were 1,043 deaths in care up to 10 April. Until then, the official toll was 217. It meant the official estimate of how many people were being killed by Covid-19 in care homes increased tenfold in 24 hours. The social care minister, Helen Whately, said on Wednesday she was “really, really worried about deaths in care homes”. “We are seeing a levelling-off in hospitals [but] we’re not seeing that in care homes,” she said. In a joint statement, the DHSC and the Care Quality Commission pointed to concerns that more people were dying in care from non-Covid-19 causes than would normally be the case. They said: “CQC’s preliminary analysis also indicates there may be a significant rise in non-Covid-19 deaths. This is of particular concern and we will be exploring the factors that may be driving this with local authorities, adult social care trade associations, PHE, NHSE – to ensure timely action is taken to safeguard people. A social care strategy unveiled last week by the health secretary, Matt Hancock, indicated that NHS nurses could eventually be sent into homes, but it has not happened yet in England apart from a small number of nurses who have returned from retirement deployed to social care. It pledged new guidance about redeploying staff between social care providers and health services to tackle staff shortages and said that nurses and student nurses were being deployed by regional health hubs “irrespective of setting or organisational boundaries”. It promised: “Nurses will be deployed to support social care.” “We need to get nursing staff into these care environments,” said Vic Rayner, the executive director of the National Care Forum. “[Care homes] might normally deal with one or two people at a time needing end-of-life care, so anything on top of that will require additional support.” Dr Anna Down, a GP in Ealing, west London, who looks after residents of 15 nursing homes, more than 100 of whom have died from suspected or confirmed Covid-19 in the past month, said “an army of staff” was needed to effectively isolate infected residents and halt virus transmission. “I have had nurses say to me this is like running a critical care unit with only one oxygen saturation probe,” she said. “They need support. It is manpower-intensive to look after sick patients.” A spokesperson for the department of health in Northern Ireland said: “Trust employed or bank staff have been working on the rotas in care homes for the last two to three weeks. This is happening in all trust areas, with significant number of trust staff in at least one care home. We expect the number of staff working in this way to grow.”