Agenda item - Chair's Communications

27.1    Cllr Evans, the HOSC Chair, gave the following communications:

At the last HOSC a couple of months ago, I started by apologising for the somewhat angry tone of my Chair’s Comms, caused by my frustration at the UK government’s abject mishandling of the Covid pandemic right from the beginning, and the unnecessarily severe suffering, loss of life and economic hardship it had caused.

At that time, we were just out of the second too-little-way-too-late lockdown, with numbers slightly decreased as a result, with the much more optimistic prospect of several vaccines being approved (& the belief that this programme, unlike the disastrous privatised PPE & TTI efforts, would be run by the NHS) gave me reason to hope that by this HOSC, we would be in a way better place, both locally and nationally.

Since then, way over 50,000 more people in England and Wales alone have lost their lives to this awful disease, and although numbers are thankfully heading downwards again, there are currently still nearly 17,000 people in hospital, the government have been ruled to have acted unlawfully in procurement practices around PPE & other contracts, and the Health Secretary doesn’t think he should either apologise or resign. We continue to tell people to isolate, without providing the means for literally millions of people on zero hours, zero rights contracts to do so, and the disease spreads and spreads and around we go again.

So, this time I make no apologies for my angry tone: we still lead the world in the worst possible way with our horrendous death toll. In fact, the UK and only 4 other countries account for HALF of the entire world’s two million plus deaths, and the other four – India, Mexico, Brazil & the USA – all have vastly bigger populations than us.

Even the one brilliantly shining happy bit of all this – and yes, of course it is the bit run by the NHS themselves, the wildly successful vaccination roll out – must be caveated by saying that although the government can and do boast truthfully that we are leading the world in terms of numbers of vaccinations administered, this is only the case because they have ordered the NHS to ignore the manufacturer’s dosing schedules, and if you look again at the international figures, we are trailing badly in numbers of people FULLY vaccinated. We can only hope & cross our fingers and toes that long term, this will be a political gamble that pays off.

Again, I think it bears repeating that of course none of this frustration is even slightly aimed at any of the much put-upon NHS staff – from the cleaners, porters, care workers at the bottom of the pay scales to the consultants and senior admins at the top, we owe them all a huge debt of gratitude for their dedication and service, and of course huge thanks to those presenting reports here today despite the continuing immense pressure they are under.

As trailed last time with verbal reports, we are revisiting in a bit more depth the important subjects of Mental Health provision during this difficult period, and the experience of the city’s BAMER communities – both as patients and as workers – during the first wave last year.

 It is clear in both cases that the rampant inequality in this country has a massive negative impact on health outcomes, and that Covid has highlighted this impact in a dramatic way. I think the writer Damian Barr coined the quote used on one of the slides in the Mental Health presentation “We are all in the same storm, but not all in the same boat”. The TDC report on BAMER experiences in particular contains many findings and quotes that I found both profoundly shocking and yet sadly, depressingly, not very surprising, if that makes any sense. For example, that so many BAME staff even in the NHS feel they are expected to take higher levels of risk than their white colleagues, or that so many BME agency workers in particular even in these most high-risk frontline roles felt they had to go into work even with uncertain symptoms (especially when there were no tests available) because otherwise they would not be paid or be able to eat!

I really want to thank and congratulate everyone involved in this brilliant piece of research, including the respondents of 56 different ethnicities who took part – I’m sure the findings and recommendations will be percolating through our various health bodies and committees for some time to come. Because if we learn nothing else from this extraordinary period in all our lives as a city and a country, we must surely recognise the need to build back better, to have a 1945 style epiphany, to fight not to just ‘go back to normal’, but to demand accountability from our leaders, demand a new, much improved normal, where it is NOT OK for some people to weather the storm ‘on a super-yacht, while others have just the one oar’.