Millions of people are getting invitations for their booster Covid jab, up to 1.8 million people this week alone. NHS England’s chief executive Amanda Pritchard has said people are not coming forward as quickly as possible and health secretary Sajid Javid urged people to get the doses and made clear the vaccination programme is the primary form of defence.
But regular readers of my newsletter and articles for The Independent will be well aware the NHS has been in the grip of a crisis in terms of demand outstripping capacity across the country for months. As a reminder, I was writing about cancer operations being delayed in June. Ambulances waiting hours outside hospitals in July and patients calling 999 being left on hold for up to 10 minutes.
Only this week we reported that some patients were waiting almost 50 hours at the Royal Preston Hospital, which declared an internal incident on Tuesday as problems continued.
As MPs on the health committee were told this week the NHS has real pressures due to the existing 6,000 Covid patients in hospital and was already running on a knife-edge pre-pandemic. We do not have sufficient beds, nurses, or doctors without Covid.
It seems there is real denial at the top of the NHS and government. At yesterday’s Downing Street press conference Sajid Javid said: “We don't believe the pressures on the NHS are unsustainable”. The UK’s military has been called in to help ambulance services to cope this summer in just one sign of how bad the situation is. I’m not sure what Sajid Javid’s definition of ‘unsustainable’ is but having to rely on soldiers to drive ambulances is in all four UK nations is not business as usual.
The health secretary also described almost 1,000 deaths a week as "mercifully low" - a comment he should not be allowed to forget anytime soon.
A day earlier NHS England’s CEO Amanda Pritchard told MPs on the health committee the NHS had not been overwhelmed during the pandemic – again she didn’t define what she meant by being overwhelmed but for a bit of a reality check consider that the NHS paused routine treatment for millions of patients, called in the military to staff wards and cancelled life-saving surgery. Staff worked 20 hours days with makeshift critical wards set up and staff who had no experience of critical care being drafted in to look after sick and dying patients.
I had hoped for better from Ms Pritchard. Giving her the benefit of the doubt, she may be trying to avoid controversy with a new budget and spending review just around the corner and she is still perhaps finding her feet. But her comments went down very badly among NHS staff on Twitter (which is a snapshot of opinion only) where many said she seemed out of touch and felt like such a comment was a kick in the teeth after everything they’ve been through.
Leadership is about confronting challenges honestly and with integrity and even if you have no good solutions, being with your team through the tough times. It is lacking at the moment.
