Unfair to ask NHS staff to risk their lives

A CONSTRUCTION worker wouldn’t be allowed to work without a hard hat and proper boots. Even a bee-keeper wouldn’t inspect a hive without proper protective clothing.

And yet this government expects NHS staff to put themselves at risk of serious illness, even death, by treating highly infectious Covid-19 patients without wearing proper protection. This is totally unacceptable.

We are told lorries are shipping hundreds of boxes of supplies of PPE (personal protective equipment) to GPs and to hospitals but that isn’t the reality for thousands of our members. The type of PPE being supplied is not in keeping with WHO recommendations. GPs in many parts of England have been told to go and buy their own stocks, only to find none are available. In Cumbria, GP practice staff went to Wickes to try and secure masks.

Hospital doctors are telling us: “We are being asked to risk our lives and our loved ones’ lives, in flimsy paper masks and plastic aprons. I don’t know if I can do it. I just don’t know if I can. I don’t think it is fair to expect this of us. I am terrified. How can this risk to practitioners, other patients, practitioners’ families be justified? My husband is not a medic and I cry every day thinking I am going to infect him.”

There are limits to the risks that doctors should expose themselves to and to go beyond those is not fair on themselves, their families or their patients.

If adequate protective wear isn’t available, a doctor in hospital has every right to ask to be moved to a low risk area or to provide patient care that doesn’t expose them to becoming infected with Covid-19.

For GPs with patients who still need face to face care, again they need to think carefully about the level of risk they are exposing themselves and other patients to if they give that care without protection. They risk making themselves ill and infecting other vulnerable patients and GPs should not have to make that choice because they don’t have the masks, gloves and gowns they should have.

We know that from international data that healthcare workers are at higher risk of becoming infected and many dying – they are naturally worried about the risks.

It’s time for the government to be transparent about the level of supplies we really have, and how they can provide healthcare staff with the level of protection they need. We know hundreds, if not thousands of doctors and frontline staff are risking their health and lives every hour of every day caring for Covid-19 patients and they should not have to do so without the right protection.

For their sakes and for the sake of the population at large, it has to stop. Every healthcare worker in every hospital or every GP surgery must have the PPE they desperately need and have it today.

Dr Chaand Nagpaul

British Medical Association chair of council