ECONOMIC RECOVERY
But is it also time to share ideas about the contribution the H &SC sector can make to strategies for economic renewal press for some imaginative new ideas for jobs, training and service delivery just as the PM is about to announce how the economy can revive? Can we not present our future Health and Care Service as a part of the transformation the economy needs as it tries to get people back to work – greener, fairer and more equal.
How? New kinds of training and apprenticeships to provide career pathways to and between professions, and between health and social care that will be attractive to the many unemployed and to school leavers? Apprenticeships to help with retrofitting hospitals and health care sites to make them carbon neutral? New forms of procurement in the health sector which create social benefit (see how our failing garment industry has turned to scrubs)? Buying from independent local food producers helping create a more sustainable agriculture? A complete rethink of transport for hospital staff and patients now that we must get more cars off the road? I am sure others can do better at spotting ways in which the sector as well as needing more money can be a contributor to the new kind of society in which we want to live.
TEST, TRACE, ISOLATE
Test, contact trace and isolate Our local members, SHA and Defend our NHS Wirral are hopping mad about the way the government has deliberately side-lined local public health, university facilities and even the Crick Institute – all those skilled personnel in favour of the multi million contracts being handed without scrutiny to their cronies like Serco, G4S etal. And they are making such a complete hash of it too with their apps, call centres and unskilled minimum wage staff Families are bereaved, valuable lives dust-binned.
The track and trace system looks to be the next government disaster in their mismanagement of this pandemic.
Firstly, I was astonished they gave up so early on trace and trace, particularly in areas outside of London and Birmingham that had low prevalence in March and early April. It does seem to have been a mixture of poor coordination, absence of preparation for the testing ( when you dont have a vaccine or a treatment but you have a test….)
That they have not used the ‘down time’ to establish organised units around PHE and DPH units seems a missed opportunity.
Contact tracing is specialist sensitive work; TB, food poisoning and sexual health. Trust and local knowledge are vital particularly if the tail end of the epidemic is to prevent break through outbreaks – this is the daily work of a health protection department.
Setting up an entirely new system at this time seems folly, rather than building and expanding/ scaling up from existing established core services. This is what was done for H1N1 in 2009. From a report in Bloomberg this seems to be what has happened n Germany.
I suspect there is going to be a delay in transfer of results – which with this disease’s ‘sneaky symptomless infectious period will make the system inefficient in getting on top of local breakthrough outbreaks, that will have a particular situational (going on a BLM demo) or organisational ( in say a post sorting room) context where investigation will be most effectively carried out through a local control centre of a health protection team.
Information Governance and Track, Trace and Isolate
The question that the team should pursue is ; what is the arrangements for information governance and has the
System established by the central scheme been reviewed against Caldicott Guardian principles. (Is the track and trace part of the NHS system of protecting patient confidentiality.)? Dido Harding who leads the English programme has form with poor information governance – she was CEO with Talk Talk when over 4 million
Clients got their personal data hacked.
Dido Harding
Why Harding was appointed should also be pursued; she is a horse racing enthusiast, like Matt Hancock and is a Jockey Club Board member that will have supported the running of the Cheltenham Festival. A chance to catch the horse that bolted. But best person to lead?
As a semi-retired GP and having lost access to my normal work following lockdown I decided to join the ranks of the (I understand) 6000 or so professionals signed up for the Test and Trace scheme. I received some welcoming emails from NHS Professionals (NHSP) and also Sitel, the call centre contractor responsible for the system. I was told I could log into NHSP’s training platform but after numerous attempts, my credentials did not work. After an hour on hold to a helpline, I was told that I needed instead to access the training modules on eLFH. I duly did this and completed several mandatory training (safeguarding, information governance, etc.) modules and some online presentations on how the system works. as well as some documents with the script I was supposed to follow in given circumstances.
I was all ready to start contacting people who had received positive tests and, using the proscribed script, check with them who their recent contacts had been. At 8 o’clock last Monday I duly logged into the four software platforms I needed for this work and was informed I had no contacts to call. I therefore sat and did some emails, looked at some more training material and at the end of the 4 hour shift had still had no- one to call.
I was disappointed with this experience but decided as this was supposed to be the first day the system went live (before Matt Hancock had decided he could announce it was live the previous Thursday) it was too early to have picked up many positive cases. I had another shift booked on Wednesday and duly logged in again to find there was 1 case to call. I brought up this record and called the number- it went to voicemail. I called again a minute or two later, still voicemail, so I left the message according to the script and scheduled a call back a couple of hours later. The appointed time arrived and the case was no longer on my list… I hope someone else had picked up the case and called. The rest of the four hour shift turned up no more cases.
I decided I needed to book some more shifts so looked at the NHSP calendar; there were no shifts available for the next two weeks. I did manage to find a shift to book in a couple of weeks’ time but looking again now, there is nothing available for the whole of the rest of June or July.
Maybe this system is working so efficiently they’ve got more contact tracers than they need or, more likely, the system just isn’t picking up all the positive tests and feeding them through and it is yet another example of Tory ‘world beating’ hype.
CONTRACTS WITH PRIVATE COMPANIES
- What private companies have been awarded contracts to provide goods or services to or on behalf of the NHS between February and the current date?
- What goods or services have each of these contracts been for?
- What is the value of each of of these contracts?
Why are we giving public money to private companies like Serco, which has been fined for defrauding govt, when many scientists argue that university and NHS public labs could as quickly cope with the tests? Is it because they have contributed to the Tory party? What about accountability to the British people?
PEOPLE WITH LEARNING DISABILITIES
- How many people with learning disabilities living in either i) NHS or ii) private hospitals or iii) care homes have died with covid-19
- What is the excess death rate for people with learning disabilities in each of the above settings for the period February – End of May 2020?
RELEASING PROFESSIONAL STAFF AT THE NO 10 MEETING
Another point I think the team should push is releasing the professional staff from their daily ‘lockdown’ in No 10 at their press conference. Ministers should do this on their own and officials should operate to traditional civil service principles – heard but not seen. With crumbling trust of the politicians, it is infecting professional staff; CMO etc.
OPENING SCHOOLS
How is it possible to open schools and unlock when testing and tracing is not up and running efficiently?
EXCESS DEATHS
Can Labour question why excess deaths last week showed that UK has the highest figures for deaths after Peru in the world? Not quite the excellent response the PM is arguing.
TAKE THE NHS OUT OF ANY TRADE DEALS WITH THE US
The faith and gratitude expressed to our NHS staff in the present pandemic is beyond belief, and CV19 is the unwelcome political experiment to have tested state versus private efficiency and enterprise in health care. In the light of this will you be insisting that the government withdraw the NHS from any participation in Trade talks with the USA – it is not even Trade, after all. I have suggested to our MP that a legal instrument is needed to protect it.*
* To Craig Mackinlay MP: Public support for our NHS must be near total at the present time as the only way of saving millions of lives from Covid19. By contrast , the USA has effectively no health service. Worse still the USA cut two thirds of its hospital beds in the last 45 years, because they were ‘unprofitable’ . US health costs are soaring by 2,4% cumulatively per year. 28 million USA citizens have no health whatsoever. Last year half of all citizens cancelled or delayed their medical care because of cost. This is third world health in the richest state in the world
Our government recently published its Trade Bill – the legislation that sets out the basis of future trade negotiations after Brexit. Unfortunately, it currently does not contain any protection whatsoever for our NHS, despite Boris Johnson’s repeated promises.
I am writing to ask you to table or support any amendments to the trade bill to introduce specific protections for our NHS. Right now, it is automatically “on the table” in trade talks, and this won’t change until it is explicitly taken off in the trade bill. We cannot risk our NHS which is performing so magnificently in this crisis, to be sold off to a US medical insurance company.
Clapping hands on the street won’t protect it: only our democratic representatives can do that. Please help save our NHS.