The failure to provide all of our frontline health and care workers with high quality personal protective equipment (PPE) from the outset of the Covid-19 scandal is a national disgrace.
It shows how despite plenty of warning that a pandemic would happen, governments - both at UK and Welsh level - were apparently too preoccupied with the needs of the day to plan ahead for a crisis that would kill thousands of people.
Forcing health and care workers to put their lives at risk in the treatment of patients and vulnerable people is unforgivable. Those who suggest there was no prior warning of a pandemic are simply wrong.
As long ago as 2005, President George W Bush gave a speech in which he said: “Leaders at every level have a responsibility to confront dangers before they appear, and engage the American people in the best course of action. It is vital that our nation discuss and address the threat of pandemic flu now. There is no pandemic flu in our country or in the world at this time. But if we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare. And one day many lives could be needlessly lost because we failed to act today.
“By preparing now, we can give our citizens some degree of peace of mind, knowing that our nation is ready to act at the first sign of
danger, and that we have the plans in place to prevent and if necessary to withstand an influenza pandemic.”
Clearly, a major part of such preparations would entail ensuring that sufficient PPE was in place to provide as much protection as possible to NHS and care workers who would be interacting with patients and vulnerable people who had contracted the virus. A key question for a future inquiry into this tragic fiasco is why the right equipment was not in place.
The suspicion must be that with the pressure on budgets in recent years, planning for a pandemic was not seen as being of the crucial importance we now know it should have been. Instead, we find ourselves in the ridiculous situation of having to cobble together items of PPE from wherever we can.
Small companies are offering their services as manufacturers of what is needed, individuals are making masks using 3D technology and desperate efforts are underway to source the equipment needed in many parts of the world.
The Welsh Ambulance Service has even issued an urgent plea to suppliers, manufacturers and members of the public to provide their frontline staff with PPE.
Academics who have maintained contact with former students from China tell how they have been sent masks for their personal use and given the option of acting as intermediaries for public bodies to buy very large quantities of high quality equipment.
Earlier this month, a paramedic with the Welsh Ambulance Service admitted that many of his colleagues were "terrified" of going into work.
Meanwhile, a 99-year-old man has been walking around his garden in an effort to raise cash for the NHS. His efforts have raised many millions of pounds. Commendable as all these efforts may be, is this really the best way for our health service to respond to Covid-19?
Our NHS is an institution that is greatly revered because of its core principle of being free at the point of treatment. In Wales we have a more purist approach in that we do not charge patients for prescriptions. We expect the NHS to be funded out of general taxation, not out of charity donations. And we expect it to be organised in a way that protects its staff from infection. That has to be a fundamental priority.
With healthcare workers dying in Wales and elsewhere in the UK, it is beyond doubt that there has been a catastrophic breakdown in the covenant of trust between the NHS and its staff. It is truly shocking that health and care workers feel afraid to go to work, and makes a nonsense of official encouragement to join in street clapping sessions for our “NHS heroes”.
A health system that is struggling to cope with what is probably the biggest challenge it has faced in the more than seven decades since it was set up is one that has been let down badly by those who fund it and those who organise it. Invoking the so-called Dunkirk spirit which in any event refers to a wartime retreat that occurred before the NHS was founded may appeal to those whose world view is suffused with imperial nostalgia, but it is wholly inappropriate for our modern era.
In any case, the spuriousness of the “all in it together” narrative has been exposed by the way in which Public Health England has
insisted that PPE suppliers should supply only English care homes rather than those in Wales or Scotland. In future years, people will look back at such behaviour and see it for the colonial, biggest-is-best mentality that it exemplifies.
What could represent the genuine collaborative spirit of the NHS, and its partners in the care sector, that is at the heart of our
admiration for it more than ensuring that all front-line workers get the kit they need to protect themselves as they tend patients and the vulnerable?
The weasel words that have been used to excuse delays or inadequacies in the provision of PPE represent a moral sickness that mirrors the physical sickness of those who have contracted the coronavirus.
We have a long way to go before this crisis is over, and both the UK Government and the Welsh Government have a lot of catching up to do. Not that it will bring back those who have died already.
