At the start of the pandemic I put forward the position that rather than wasting money on disposable PPE, the Government should be looking at the long term cost saving of supplying proper PPE to staff in the NHS. This actually made it onto the Scottish News with the question being put to Douglas Ross. His response was basically to brush it aside as unnecessary.
Today I was scrolling through Twitter and came across a tweet from Dr. Julia Simons, who has been infected with COVID on no less than 3 occasions.
I don’t like to use the phrase, but on this, I most definitely make an exception – I told you so Mr Ross!
Dr Simons’s story is not an unusual one. Indeed there are health boards in the UK where absenteeism has hit 50%. That’s not just a shortage of staff for dealing with COVID, that means the redeployment of staff away from other services like elective surgeries, cancer treatment, hip replacements, knee replacements…the list goes on. It also affects other non-medical critical infrastructure like the domestic staff, after all you can’t run a ward or a surgery theatre unless they are kept meticulously clean. Then you have the administrative staff dealing with patient paperwork and the operations of the hospitals. You have the guys and girls preparing food for the patients, and for the canteens etc. Every link in the hospital chain is an important one, and all of them are in close contact with each other. They all need proper protection.
To put the cost of properly protecting NHS staff in perspective, we know that the UK Government has squandered nearly £10bn on unsuitable or defective PPE. Now obviously there were supply change issues at the beginning and it came down to getting what PPE you could get, however, there was no long term plan to protect NHS Workers who are in knowingly direct contact with patients who have COVID. It seems the answer is to continue indiscriminantly buying massive amounts of disposable PPE.
For just £1.5 billion pounds, standard cloth and plastic PPE could have been gradually phased out with every NHS employee supplied with one of these:
It’s still not too late to do this and protect NHS workers. Supplying them the right gear now will only drop the cost in the long run for the crappy PPE they have at the minute – because that PPE is not reusable, it goes in the bin. It will also mean less people being ill, less disruption to service provision – but more importantly, less NHS staff going down permanently because they end up with long COVID.