MPs hear doctors criticise plans to scrap health body in pandemic
CONTROVERSIAL PLANS to scrap Public Health England ( PHE) and replace it with a new body have “little clarity” and risk the loss of highly trained staff, MPs have been told.
Doctors criticised the Government’s decision to launch the new National Institute for Health Protection ( NIHP) in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, and expressed concern over how it will affect efforts to improve the nation’s health and the morale of “exhausted” workers.
Their comments came in response to questions from members of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Coronavirus.
Dr Isobel Braithwaite, an academic clinical fellow at University College London, who has been involved with PHE’s London Coronavirus Response Cell, said: “People have been working incredibly hard and we’re facing a very difficult winter. It doesn’t feel like
a good time for a distraction like this. And I think it’s going to make recruitment more challenging and I think we risk losing a lot of very specialised and highly trained people.”
She added: “My impression is certainly that morale is pretty low and that’s from a low baseline.”
Dr Braithwaite argued that a potential second wave should be seen as “multiple second waves” with impacts on waiting lists, cancer diagnosis, mental health, sexual health and other services, but where public health can play a “vital” role. She added: “Increasing uncertainty, risking additional people leaving the system and changing everything so that potentially it’s less effective, will not just impact on the infection risks, but all of them.”
Earlier this month, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the NIHP, headed by Tory peer Dido Harding, would focus on health threats including infectious diseases, pandemics and biologic weapons. Mr Hancock said it would be “wrong” to delay the merger of the work of PHE, NHS Test and Trace and the Joint Biosecurity Centre into one.
But Martin McKee, professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told MPs: “I’m not at all clear what the problem is that it’s meant to be solving, that’s the first issue.”