Covid-19 inquiry: Government criticised by BMA chairman for being "unprepared" before pandemic struck

The UK government is in the midst of an inquiry into the Covid-19 pandemic, identifying what lessons can be learned from how the pandemic was prepared for, managed and the following aftermath.

Yesterday (17 July), the chairman of the British Medical Association, Professor Phil Banfield, told the inquiry panel that failures to prepare for a pandemic can be dated as far back as 2012, when the government made reforms from the Health and Social Care Act. He claimed that this "eroded" the ability for public health teams and the government to "plan and scale up rapidly".

Professor Banfield said: "In fact we raised concerns at that time that changes proposed to public health by effectively dismantling the current situation in 2012/13, because that was being planned ahead of time, would threaten the ability to mount an effective pandemic response in the future.

“In any sort of infection outbreak you need to be able to escalate things like testing for the disease, contact tracing; being able to isolate, quarantine and having expertise is incredibly important.

“They would have expected testing to become more widely available more quickly. At the point at which that didn't happen, and testing was taken into the private sector and lighthouse labs, we started to get a disconnect of information because the IT systems were not compatible.”

In the inquiry, Professor Banfield was representing the medical professionals who worked throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, which as of 16 June this year has killed 228,492 people in the UK.

He added that medical professionals were worried for the safety of not only their patients, but also themselves, due to a lack of preparation.

"We knew that this was unprepared for," he said.

"We had no idea what was coming our way. We were suddenly in a position where not only patients were going to die, but our colleagues and ourselves were in a position where we might die because we felt so unprepared.”

“The number of beds has been falling, the number of staff has been falling, and we have been raising concerns prior to the pandemic, that we were not coping with the capacity that was needed to run the health service - therefore there would be no surge capacity if an epic pandemic happened.”