Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock have been criticised by bereaved families during the Covid inquiry for attempting to mislead the public by “shamelessly” claiming that “things were going pretty well” in the NHS.
On the opening day of 10 weeks of evidence in a module focusing on the impact of the pandemic on the health service, Pete Weatherby KC, representing Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK, said claims the NHS had bailed out were “false”.
The inquiry’s chair, Heather Hallett, heard on Monday that the NHS had entered the pandemic with far fewer intensive care beds than many developed countries and had many nurse vacancies.
Figures from the Intensive Care Society show that at the start of the pandemic, the UK had 7.3 intensive care beds per 100,000 population, while Germany had 28.2 beds per 100,000 population and the Czech Republic had 43.2.
A survey of 1,683 healthcare professionals found that 71% of emergency room doctors and 62% of paramedics were unable to scale up care for the people they were treating due to lack of capacity.
At one point in March 2020, it took almost 10 minutes for a call to London Ambulance Service to be answered. The Department of Health began drawing up a policy to determine who should receive intensive care in the event that intensive care units (ICUs) became overcrowded.
There is evidence that the ‘do not resuscitate’ warnings have been misused and that the disproportionate impact of Covid on black, Asian and minority ethnic groups, who make up a quarter of the NHS nursing staff and more than 40% of doctors, has not been taken into account.
The research found that this lack of capacity led to poorer outcomes, with 186,686 people recorded as having died from Covid-related illnesses in the UK between March 2020 and February 2022, with 60% to 70% of these deaths occurring 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 claimed that one of the major successes of the Covid response was that the NHS was never overwhelmed.
“It is true that we have not seen scenes from a dystopian disaster movie with empty, looted hospitals, but the fact that hospitals and healthcare facilities are still functioning at some level should not lead to the dangerously misleading conclusion that things have gone reasonably well.
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“The narrative that the health care system has managed without being overwhelmed is false and must be exposed as such.”
In his evidence to an earlier session of the public inquiry into the Covid pandemic, Johnson, who was prime minister from 2019 to 2022, claimed that his government had “succeeded in delivering the central aim of public policy, which was to avoid overwhelming the NHS and ensure that every patient was treated”.
Hancock, who was forced to resign after it was revealed he had breached social distancing guidelines over Covid, had also written in his testimony that “we have put in place measures to ensure the NHS is never overstretched”.
Inquiry counsel Jacqueline Carey KC used her opening statement to read out evidence from staff who saw people dying alone on the wards. She said efforts to increase ICU capacity had worked, but “we will nevertheless have to consider where there was still an inability to care for some patients in an ICU environment with the amount and type of care that they required”.