Covid#20 - On the Government's scandalous neglect of frontline workers

I’d planned to write a really upbeat, positive blog-post today about how coronavirus has brought out the good in so many people.  Then I watched last night’s Panorama.

Over one hundred NHS workers have now died from Covid19 and there is no doubt in the minds of some of their colleagues that many may have lived if they’d had the personal protective equipment they needed to protect them.

PPE has been in the news since this emergency began.  Healthcare professionals have been on the news every day questioning the quality and adequacy of the equipment with which they have been provided.  Relatives of those who have died have publicly asked why they weren’t better protected; on the radio this morning, the son of one doctor asked the Health Secretary for an apology.  Fearful carehome managers have been crying out for better supplies.  Carers, nurses and doctors have been making do with flimsy plastic aprons – described by one doctor as suitable only for dinner-ladies – and scrambling to buy their own PPE – or doing the best they can with bin-bags.  Volunteers are making facemasks, gowns and visors for hospitals, medical centres, surgeries and carehomes and seeking charitable donations for the materials they need.  My own school has placed an order from one collective of volunteers; incredibly, it’s suggested that panty-liners are used in the masks as filters. 

Matt Hancock and his cabinet colleagues have told us over and over again that everything in their power is being done to deliver the PPE so desperately needed across the country.  Two weeks ago Hancock launched a new plan for guidance, distribution and future supply of PPE, which emphasised the need to ‘ramp up’ domestic production, and said he would ‘stop at nothing’ to protect those on the frontline and that there was a ‘herculean effort, supported by the military’.  That was the very same day that saw the biggest rise in Covid19 deaths in UK hospitals, by which time nearly 9,000 deaths had been recorded in total.  Horses bolting spring to mind.

Still today, Hancock seeks to reassure an increasingly sceptical and critical public that the Government is on top of the PPE problem.  ‘What we do have is constant focus on the realities of getting PPE to the frontline,’ he said at today’s briefing, adding, ‘we have been moving heaven and earth’ in a ‘mammoth effort’.  His present-tense claims about what is being down now are intended to deflect from questions about what they should have done in the past, yet the questions keep coming and his broken-record answers seem increasingly desperate.  The effort has been herculean, ramped-up and mammoth, but still it isn’t enough; still it was necessary for Boris Johnson to focus on PPE today at his first coronavirus cabinet meeting since returning to work – as if it is a new problem; still the frontline they claim to protect, complains that it’s being neglected. 

Cynical-me thought he couldn’t be shocked by anything revealed on Panorama last night.  I was wrong.  It emerged that stockpiles of PPE have been run down despite that a pandemic has been deemed the greatest threat to Britain for almost a decade.  No hospital gowns or visors were purchased.  Elsewhere, it’s been suggested that our preparedness for a pandemic has been the victim of the Tories’ austerity agenda and the diversion of officials to Brexit planning. 

Most days now, we’re told how many millions of items of PPE have been delivered to the frontline, but in a typically tricksy bit of Government number-work, it turns out this includes such things as cleaning equipment and bin-bags and that gloves are counted singly rather than as pairs.  Ministers hail a total of 1.3 million hospital gowns delivered to the frontline, but hundreds of thousands are needed every day.  In five weeks, a total of 360 gowns were delivered to one NHS Trust, equating to a total of ten per day across the whole Trust; guidance issued at the start of February by the European Centre of Disease Control specified that for the most serious cases of Covid19, around twenty sets of full PPE would be needed per patient, per day.  Having not yet been approached by the Government for supplies, potential PPE manufacturers based in the UK offered their help in March but were ignored so took their orders from other countries instead.  Michael Gove has explained that important safety standards had to be met in the manufacture of essential equipment; meanwhile, doctors and nurses made do with whatever they could find at home!

In March, Covid19 was downgraded from a high consequence infectious disease despite having been designated such just two months previously and being the most dangerous outbreak in a century.  Conveniently for the Government, the conclusions of the Health and Safety Executive for what PPE was required for the worst type of disease could therefore be disregarded and it’s indifference to the advice of the World Health Organisation concerning PPE is seemingly justified.

If a pandemic had been completely unexpected, the Government’s unpreparedness could be understandable.  If its own plans hadn’t specified exactly what we needed and now lack, it may have been able to justify not having it.  If it had sprung into action in January when the threat first emerged or at least a few weeks later when the virus reached Europe, we might now forgive continuing shortages.  As one doctor put it, however, ‘It is unprecedented but it wasn’t unexpected’.  It’s all well and good the Prime Minister prioritising PPE on his return to work, but where was he at the start of this crisis when the Government had the opportunity to hit the ground running and get ahead of the virus and, as The Sunday Times reported, he was absent from all five of the first COBRA meetings?

The Government exhorts us to protect the NHS in order to save lives.  Meanwhile, it fails to protect our doctors and nurses and too many of them are dying.  Today, there was a minute’s silence for key workers who have died during this emergency.  Every Thursday, we’ll applaud the living once again, but as the weeks pass our gratitude for their hard work will be matched with sadness for their colleagues who have succumbed to the virus and anger at the Government’s scandalous neglect of them.