Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock have been criticised by bereaved families at the Covid inquiry for trying to mislead the public by “brazenly” claiming “things went reasonably well” in the NHS.
On the opening day of 10 weeks of evidence in a module focused on the impact of the pandemic on the health service, Pete Weatherby KC, representing the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK, said claims that the NHS had coped were “false”.
The inquiry chair, Heather Hallett, heard on Monday that the NHS had entered the pandemic with far fewer intensive care equipped beds than many developed countries and that there had been high levels of nursing vacancies.
Figures provided by the Intensive Care Society indicate the UK entered the pandemic with 7.3 critical care beds per 100,000 people, while Germany had 28.2 beds per 100,000 and the Czech Republic had 43.2.
As a result of a lack of capacity, a survey carried out by the inquiry of 1,683 healthcare professionals found that 71% of A&E doctors and 62% of paramedics found themselves unable to escalate the care of those they were treating.
At one point in March 2020, it took nearly 10 minutes for calls to the London ambulance service to be answered, and the Department of Health started working on a policy of how to choose who should get critical care in the event of intensive care units (ICU) becoming saturated.
There was evidence heard of the misuse of “do not resuscitate” notices and a lack of consideration of the disproportionate impact of Covid on black, Asian and ethnic minority groups, who made up a quarter of the NHS’s nursing staff and more than 40% of its doctors.
The inquiry heard claims that this lack of capacity did lead to worse outcomes and that 186,686 people had been registered as dying in the UK with Covid-related conditions between March 2020 and February 2022 of which 60% to 70% had died in hospital.
Weatherby told the inquiry in his opening statement: “A very different picture [to that] painted by Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock and others who have brazenly asserted that one of the key successes of the Covid response was that the NHS was never overwhelmed.
“True enough, we did not see scenes from a dystopian disaster film with empty ransacked hospitals, but the fact that hospitals and healthcare facilities continue to operate at some level must not be allowed to point to a dangerously misleading conclusion that things went reasonably well.
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“The narrative that the health service coped without being coming overwhelmed is a false one, and needs to called out as such.”
In his evidence to an earlier session of the public inquiry into the Covid pandemic, Johnson, who was prime minister from 2019-22, claimed his administration “succeeded in the central aim of government policy, which was to prevent the overwhelming of the NHS and to make sure that every patient was treated”.
Hancock, who was forced to resign after being found to have broken Covid social distancing guidelines, had also written in his evidence that “we took action to ensure that the NHS was never overwhelmed”.
The counsel to the inquiry, Jacqueline Carey KC, used her opening statement to read out the testimony of staff who watched people dying in the wards alone. She said efforts to increase ICU capacity had worked but “we will nonetheless need to consider where there was still an inability to care for some patients in an ICU setting with the amount and type of care that they needed”.