Humanity has a penchant for viewing the past with rose-tinted glasses, hence the popular term the ‘good old days’. We just have a tendency to filter out the bad bits or conveniently forget them.
For many, I think this is true to some degree when it comes to the Covid-19 pandemic. I’m not saying anyone views it positively – except, perhaps, when it comes to the expansion of flexible working.
“The emerging key message is that the NHS and wider UK health and social care system were unprepared for a pandemic”
However, we have largely adapted and got on with our lives again, seemingly without another thought to Covid-19. Wanting to forget pandemics may be natural, I suspect.
There are of course those struggling with long-term effects from Covid-19, and others mourning loved ones lost to the virus, for whom moving forward it difficult.
But in my experience, these days Covid-19 mostly only gets mentioned as a factor for something still being bad, like the economy or NHS waiting lists. Or makes the news in passing reference.
For example, I read the other day that scientists have decided that it is “beyond reasonable doubt” that the pandemic began in a Chinese food market rather than the theories about a laboratory leak.
I also read recently that Dave Navarro, guitarist with the band Jane’s Addiction, couldn’t tour for two years due to having long Covid. Both interesting.
However, this week at the Covid Inquiry things felt different. We were jolted back to the dark days of 2020, as the then chief nurses of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland gave their evidence.
Dame Ruth May, until recently England’s CNO, recalled – at times emotionally – the tough decisions she faced on diluting critical care staffing ratios and the deployment of final-year student nurses.
She also revealed that, due to fewer new staff caused by the removal of the student bursary, she thought hospitals in England were short, on average, by around 40 nurses each of what they needed.
In addition, she recalled the discomfort of wearing full-body personal protective equipment (PPE) while working on the frontline, a feeling that will no doubt chime with many.
Meanwhile, former CNO for Scotland, Professor Fiona McQueen, said nurses witnessed death during the Covid-19 pandemic on a scale “that they should never have seen”.
She highlighted that the pandemic was “relentless” for nursing staff, noting that her own daughter was among the student nurses deployed to help out.
Similarly, Jean White and Charlotte McArdle, previously CNOs of Wales and Northern Ireland respectively, flagged the pressure on critical care and going into the pandemic short of staff.
It is telling also that all four are now former CNOs, with three having retired. While they described the negative impact on their workforces, the pressure on them as leaders must have been terrible.
They did, of course, reveal much more detail about their decisions and reflections regarding the pandemic during the hours of evidence they gave at the inquiry, which you can find in our live feed.
Earlier, Unison’s national secretary Sara Gorton told the inquiry about the effect of the pandemic on staff wellbeing, as did Diya Sen Gupta KC, representing the Frontline Migrant Health Workers Group.
The Royal College of Nursing is yet to give its evidence in person, but I imagine we can expect more of the same.
While I can’t pre-empt the inquiry’s findings, the emerging key message is that the NHS and wider UK health and social care system were unprepared for a pandemic – perhaps unsurprisingly.
But the fact that the health service was short of staff, especially nurses, in the period before the pandemic, and was already struggling to cope with the impact of that, was a known problem.
Unions, think tanks, researchers and other organisations representing nursing, as well as Nursing Times, had been warning about the staffing crisis for a number of years before Covid-19.
An important lesson, therefore, for governments and policy makers is not to ignore such warnings in future and, vitally, to not forget the pandemic and its legacy. The inquiry continues….
Steve Ford, editor, Nursing Times